Wikidata talk:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America

To do

• Collect or assess the ways information about First Nations, Inuit and Métis people are modeled in Wikidata

Properties for discussion or proposal

Through the York/ARL project we've identified some initial areas that require some discussion and expansion.

• Canadian reservations are both geographic items as well as organizations/nations. It seems most of the reservations are currently working well. For example, frequently a person was born on, or resides at a reservation, but this cannot currently be recorded. It would be helpful to work on this. --Smallison (talk) 11:58, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

@Smallison: In the US, typically the split is Indian reservation of the United States (Q5398059) (place) and federally recognized Native American tribe in the United States (Q7840353) (tribe/people). Neither of these is an organization or government, and I once found myself trying to deal with a "people" whose legal form is a 501(c)(3) organization (Q18325436). I think in the long term the proper structure might be three items: one for the people (ethnic group), one for the tribal nation (some subclass of organization), and one for the reservation/tribal lands (place). - PKM (talk) 19:51, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Instance of ...?

It's impossible to get a "clean" list of all items about indigenous peoples in North America in Wikidata because many of them are <instance of> ethnic group (Q41710) (based on categorization in English Wikipedia) with no class tree and few other statements. Perhaps our first order of business should be to decide what these items should be <instance of>? We don't have an item for "indigenous peoples of North America" - it's concatenated with Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Q36747) (probably due to the redirect in English Wikipedia).

My thought is to make an item for "indigenous peoples of North America", make the major regional cultures (e.g. Eastern Woodlands) subclasses of this, and then set a standard that peoples should be an <instance of> "indigenous peoples of North America" or any of its subclasses. I am certainly open to other suggestions. - PKM (talk) 21:04, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Note to readers: the item indigenous peoples of North America (Q15571255) has existed for some time and has had several edits. Fjjulien (talk) 16:19, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

@PKM Any People or Nation that is a direct or indirect subclass of Indigenous people (Q103817) is also a subclass of ethnic group (Q41710) Would the statement instance of (P31)ethnic group (Q41710) even needed at all if there were a clean subclass hierarchy? I'm not entirely sure.

I'm also observing diverging modelling approaches: relationships between people items are sometimes stated with subclass of (P279) and some other times with part of (P361). This makes queries quite difficult.

These kinds of questions are fundamental, but I don't have the expertise to offer any answer. These questions should be addressed within the context of the Data Modelling Days. Fjjulien (talk) 16:26, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

current status?

Hi, I'm a metadata librarian at University of California, Riverside and would be interested in contributing to this project. I'm currently working on a digitization project with Sherman Indian High School & thinking about how we might use Wikidata to improve metadata for the digital collection. Is this project currently active? --Certainstars (talk) 23:14, 5 August 2018 (UTC)

Some useful queries

United States

• Indian reservations of the United States and their occupants
• Federally-recognized tribes and their locations (very incomplete)
  • 573 Tribal entities are recognized and eligible for funding and services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) as of January 30, 2018 - compare en:List of federally recognized tribes in the United States
• Indigenous peoples of the United States (very incomplete)

Canada

• Indigenous artists from Canada (ethnic group: Indigenous people in Canada, no filter for location, may include Indigenous persons born in the United States)

Chat discussion

See the discussion "Items "missed" by a query" in the query request chat, April 2023

Wikidata proposal related to this project

Hello, a Wikidata proposal related to this project is ongoing. StarTrekker (talk) 07:16, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Reinvigorating work on this project

I am doing some work in this are and would like to connect with others who have an interest. My primary motivation and focus is on documenting Tribes in the U.S. as sovereign nations/civil societies with governmental entities that have government-to-government relationships with the U.S. and state/local governments. This has relationships to the heads of state/government project and probably others as well.

This work may have faltered previously based on a focus toward identifying and documenting data sources. That's still a viable piece of the puzzle, but the reality is that many of those data sources, including things like "official" listings from the BIA are woefully inadequate and out of date. My goal is to help lay out some useful conventions and design patterns and engage Tribal members and governments in contributing and leveraging Wikidata and related Wikimedia projects in practical applications.

This work is more important than ever as we continue to advance AI, partially trained on structured knowledge graphs, to ensure that Tribes and their civil governance organizations are represented and linked to appropriately and that the representation of Tribes in the "Global Knowledge Commons" is owned by these sovereign Nations themselves. Skybristol (talk) 12:26, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

• I fully agree with you about the need to train AI with proper and respectful datasets about Indigenous peoples. This project has been fairly quiet in recent years, and I too would love to see it reinvigorated. I suggest you add yourself to the list of participants, so that we can ping you if/when activities are organized. If you happen to be attending WikiConference North America this weekend, let's try to connect. Fjjulien (talk) 16:04, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• I totally support reinvigorating this project. I have been reluctant to do too much work without input from Indigenous editors regarding best practices, terminology, and the like. PKM (talk) 23:55, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
• One piece of the puzzle may be meta:Wikiproject Local Contexts. Arlo Barnes (talk) 05:22, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

area-based completeness checking

proof of concept (Q1201019) at user:Arlo Barnes/Q15571255 using Aridoamerica>Puebloans as the example for now — Arlo Barnes (talk) 21:53, 8 April 2024 (UTC)