#Wikidata - Speakers at the #Cochrane Colloquium 2018

All the speakers announced for the Cochrane Colloquium 2018 have a presence on #Wikidata. Cochrane is a vital organisation; it debunks much of fake science by researching published papers. It asks for volunteers to help with this effort and its mission is to "promote evidence-informed health decision making by producing high-quality, relevant, accessible evidence".

Cochrane and the Wikimedia community collaborate, there is a Wikipedian in Residence. There have been editathons where articles were updated based on evidence (not sources) and consequently there is ample room for collaboration at the Wikidata level as well.

All speakers have been added to Wikidata and Mrs Sue Ziebland a professor at Oxford University, was new. This was not the case for many of her papers; they identified one author as "Sue Ziebland". Daniel Mietchen was so gracious to link the papers to the person and thanks to the Scholia tool Mrs Ziebland gets a lot of depth.

So what could a Wikidata / Cochrane collaboration look like? With a positive spin, all the positive authors according to Cochrane get a Wikidata item and, like Daniel did for Mrs Ziebland, the publications are linked to the person. When Cochrane provides links to its database, we can even see why a specific paper is so relevant. This will help Wikipedia editors because evidence-informed health decisions can be made and determine disputes in articles.
Thanks,
        GerardM