Help/Getting started

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About this page

This page is a short guide for new contributors to Metabase. It explains how to get started and suggests some ways you can help.

Create an account

You must be logged in to edit Metabase.

Metabase is not part of the Wikimedia ecosystem, so your Wikimedia account does not work here. Create a separate Metabase account before you start.

What makes a good item?

Your edits do not have to be perfect. Metabase is a collaborative project, just like Wikipedia and Wikidata, and other contributors can improve your work later.

Before you create a new item, look at existing items of the same type. You will find examples for each type further down this page. To find more examples of resources, use MEOW and filter by resource type.

A good item includes at least the following:

Ways to contribute

Add a resource

Resources can be many different things, such as articles, reports, posters and videos. Here is one example of each common type:

For the full list of resource types, see MEOW.

Where to find resources

Good places to look are publications from your Wikimedia affiliate or region, such as conference slide decks, posters and brochures. You can find these on Wikimedia Commons and on external websites. For example:

Add a conference session

Sessions from conferences such as Wikimania can also have their own items. Here are two examples of Wikimania sessions:

Add and link people

Temporary strings

Sometimes a resource has an author, organizer or other value that does not have an item in Metabase yet. In that case, use temporary free text field (P38) to write it as plain text.

This property works like author name string on Wikidata, but it can be used for more kinds of information, not only authors.

You can help by finding temporary strings and replacing them with links to items. These tools make it easier:

When you replace a temporary string with a link to an item, you can add the qualifier object named as (P40) with the name exactly as it appears in the source.

Create a person item

If the person you need does not have an item yet, you can create one. Person items in Metabase only include very basic information. Here are two examples:

Add keywords to resources

Many resources do not have any keywords yet. You can find them with these tools:

If you cannot find a suitable keyword, create a new item for it. Here are two examples of keyword items:

What makes a good keyword?

Keywords help people discover resources they did not know existed. A good keyword answers this question:

What would someone search for to find this resource?

Good keywords are:

  • specific enough to tell the topic apart from similar topics
  • useful for searching, and do not simply repeat the title or description
  • about the main themes of the resource, not every topic it mentions briefly
  • consistent with the keywords used for similar resources, whenever possible

Tip: Think about the words you would type into the search box if you were looking for this resource.

Adding references

Just like in Wikidata, we have a number of properties for references. References can be added when the information does not come from the resource itself.

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