Maastricht professors & Wikidata

Manuël Boessen

In 2019, Maastricht University participated in a project ‘Wiki scientists’ of the Academic Heritage Foundation with the aim of presenting a complete overview of Dutch professors via Wikipedia. An overview has been published via Wikidata of these important persons in the scientific history of the Netherlands, since 1575, and for Maastricht, thus, since its foundation in 1976.

Wikidata is the free, collaborative and multilingual database for collecting structured data to support Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and the other wikis of the Wikipedia movement. Not only the Wikipedia sister projects make use of this site, but the database is also increasingly used by researchers from, among others, the digital humanities disciplines.

This overview has recently been available for consultation. The overview will also function as central access to the distributed publications, collections and archives of Dutch scientists that are held by various Dutch (university) libraries and heritage institutions.

On delivery in 2019, the dataset of Maastricht professors was limited to those who have given explicit permission for inclusion in Wikidata. Just like Wikipedia, Wikidata is freely accessible to everyone to use, and on this interactive forum, the data can also be freely edited and supplemented. The overview is never complete and can be supplemented daily.

See here for the current overview of Maastricht professors:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki-wetenschappers/Universiteit_Maastricht/hoogleraren https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki-wetenschappers

An overview of Maastricht University in Wikidata:

https://scholia.toolforge.org/organization/Q1137652

From left to right:

serie 1: Anneke Bergh-van den Braam, Louis Boon, Co Greep

serie 2: Mariëlle Heijltjes, Joan Muysken, Hans Philipsen

serie 3: Wilhelmina Rouwenhorst, Gerard de Vries, Wynand Wijnen