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I am James Hare, a software developer and consultant from the United States, currently located in Portland, Oregon. I have been contributing to Wikipedia since 2004, writing about many arbitrary topics including government regulations, prescription medications, and very old video games. Since 2014 I have been a contributor to Wikidata, focusing heavily on chemical data and Wikipedia article source metadata. I first started experimenting with Wikifunctions on the Beta Cluster in 2022.
In the past I developed Wikipedia bots to manage several English Wikipedia workflows, including Requests for Comment, Feedback Request Service, Good Article Nominations, Miscellany for Deletion, Requested Moves, Proposed Mergers, the Dashboard, and various reports. New bot operators have taken on most of these tasks.
I joined the founding board of Wikimedia District of Columbia in 2011 and served on the board until 2018. During my time with Wikimedia DC I built a strong network between DC-based knowledge institutions and the Wikimedia community while also building up leaders in the Wikimedia community, including future Wikimedia Foundation employees and Wikimedians of the Year. From 2018 to 2019 I worked full time as an associate product manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. Currently, I consult organizations and businesses on product strategy, data modeling, and Wikibase implementation. I also develop my own products.
Links
- Mastodon: @hare @wikis.world
- Personal website
Projects
- Librarybase, a complementary wiki to Wikidata that functions as a card catalog for all publications of all kinds. It exists to bring together existing databases as well as publications not yet described by existing databases, offering the community to opportunity to improve on existing data as well. It is being built to ultimately accommodate data that is rejected from Wikidata, to pursue a metadata graph beyond the tolerances of Wikidata's community, but I have been slow to grow the project while working on its implementation. The Internet Domains Wikibase is an adjunct database focusing strictly on domain names as identifiers of content and content publishers.
- Orb Open Graph, a private Wikidata Query Service with no query timeouts and additional data sources upon request. This is to help scaling issues WikiCite and the Wikidata community have been experiencing, and because I want to explore Wikidata as an application platform.
- Wikibase World, a community-built database of wikis running Wikibase software, itself running on Wikibase. Wikidata is the largest and most well known Wikibase, but it is just one of a broader Wikibase ecosystem or "federation" as mapped by Wikibase World.
Work
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For each project on this list, I was compensated by the named organization associated with the project.
Current
- Internet Archive since 2020: I manage the day-to-day operations of InternetArchiveBot, including volunteer support and managing deployments to new wikis. InternetArchiveBot now operates on Wikipedia in over 300 languages. I support the WikiCite community through community meetings and software projects like Citationgraph bot and Identifier sync bot on Wikidata. The WikiCite community is building an open database of source metadata on Wikidata, and these bots help build that database and make it more useful.
- Hacks/Hackers since 2023: Credibility Bot, a bot that tracks the usage of sources in a given set of articles. Developed to support the Vaccine Safety project which I redesigned using a new template system called Workspaces.
- National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health since 2023: Improvements to WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health and formalization of the Institute's Wikimedia engagement strategy, including consistent dissemination of metadata as part of the WikiCite initiative. Edits are made as User:James Hare (NIOSH).
- Wikimedia Medicine since 2024: technical project management for their growing library of projects, including MDWiki.org, NC Commons, VideoWiki, Internet in a Box, and more.
Past
- Toolhub, a comprehensive catalog of the software tools used by the Wikimedia movement. I spent early 2018 writing a detailed specification for this "app store" of contributor and organizer tools while working for the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Engagement team has been supporting the project since 2020.
- The Wikimedia Resource Center, including the {{Portal navigation}} meta-template that is used throughout Meta and as the primary navigation for Wikimania wiki. These were developed as part of a Wikimedia Foundation internship in 2017.
- Librarybase (first-generation), a Wikimedia Foundation grant-funded project to build a Wikibase of academic resources. Librarybase was discontinued to focus on reference metadata modeling in Wikidata while making recommendations for evolution of the project. I view the proposed Shared Citations project to be a necessary counterpart to Librarybase.
- Wikipedian in Residence at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) from 2015 to 2017. I modeled NIOSH datasets on chemical hazards and research publication for inclusion in Wikidata, uploaded many public domain videos to Wikimedia Commons, and trained NIOSH staff on Wikipedia editing best practices.
- WikiProject X, a research and development project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation grant focusing on WikiProjects, subject-area collaborations on Wikipedia. This culminated in a new design template for WikiProjects, recommendation and information feeds, and an automated directory of WikiProjects.
Boards
I have served on the Board of Directors of three nonprofit organizations:
- Wikimedia District of Columbia (2011-2018). In addition to the work described above, I focused on event management, including Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC; and WikiConference USA 2014 and 2015 (now WikiConference North America). I have also planned and executed many smaller outreach events and training workshops. In addition I set up donation and membership workflows on the Wikimedia DC website to make supporting Wikimedia DC as streamlined a process as possible.
- Wiki Project Med Foundation (2017). Now called Wikimedia Medicine, I served as the treasurer and worked on governance issues for the globally distributed board.
- WikiTide Foundation (2023-present). The WikiTide Foundation is the leading nonprofit provider of MediaWiki hosting services, providing wikis free of cost and advertisements for the public good. The WikiTide Foundation was founded in 2023 as an offshoot of the Miraheze project; now in 2024, WikiTide is the fiscal sponsor of Miraheze and its 5,000+ wikis.