A Wikimedian-in-Residence and More Slovak Music

Do you want to listen to more Slovak music and know it better?

Since the fall of 2024, we are working on a new project: Slovak Comprehensive Music Database. The goal of this project is to improve the coverage of Slovak music artists and their music on Slovak Wikipedia and Wikidata. It is from here that listeners and streaming services themselves take data. One of the initial impulses came from studies dealing with wrongly distributed royalties to the incorrect artists due to (meta)data missing from databases such as Wikidata and which are taken by services such as Spotify. Due to the same reason and because of specific algorithms of the services, Slovak music artists are also recommended on a lower scale to listeners interested in this local music. The Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society (SOZA) and the Music Centre Slovakia will be involved from the Slovak side, the Dutch company Reprex will be responsible for the technical side of the project. A position of a Wikimedian in Residence will be a part of this project. I started working on this position in the fall of 2024.

The first part of the project, already under way, is to create a database built from already existing databases: the partially public database of the Music Centre Slovakia and the non-public database of SOZA. The data in the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database will be checked, edited and prepared for publication on Wikidata. Its publication will connect it to Wikidata and data will regularly flow in both directions between the two, enriching, widening and updating both.
The second part of the project will be connected to Wikipedia. Music Centre Slovakia has its own encyklopedia of music authors, ensembles, works and organizations. This encyclopedia will be interconnected with Wikipedia either through Wikidata and a linking template or through an import of a part of the text. Since data about Slovak music artists, organizations, works and ensembles on Wikidata will be more complete, current and reliable thanks to the project, it will be possible to use it for new article creation. Another possibility is the addition of articles to other language editions of Wikipedia. The possibility of preparing templates for articles of people so that the data on Wikipedia can be taken from Wikidata brings even more value. This work could be done by Reprex in consultation with the Slovak Wikipedia community. The second part of the project will depend on consultations and collaboration with wikipedians.

Matej Grochal, CC-BY-ND 4.0