Despite many advances in knowledge engineering (KE), challenges remain in areas such as engineering knowledge graphs (KGs) at scale, automating tasks, and keeping pace with evolving domain knowledge. KE has used NLP demonstrating notable advantages in knowledge-intensive tasks, but the most effective use of generative AI to support knowledge engineers across the KE activities is still in its infancy. To explore how generative AI may enhance KE and change existing KE practices, we conducted a multi-method study during a KE hackathon. We investigated participants’ views on the use of generative AI, the challenges they face, the skills they may need to integrate generative AI into their practices, and how they use generative AI responsibly. We found participants felt LLMs could indeed contribute to improving efficiency when engineering KGs, but presented increased challenges around the already complex issues of evaluating KE task success. We discovered prompting to be a useful but undervalued skill for knowledge engineers working with LLMs, and note that NLP skills may become more relevant across more roles in KE workflows. Integrating generative AI into KE tasks needs to be done with awareness of potential risks and harms. Given the limited ethical training most knowledge engineers receive, solutions such as our proposed ‘KG Cards’ based on Data Cards could be a useful guide for KG construction. Our findings can support designers of KE AI copilots, KE researchers, and practitioners using advanced AI to develop trustworthy applications, propose new methodologies for KE and operate new technologies responsibly.

In this work, we study disagreements in discussions around Wikidata, an online knowledge community that builds the data backend of Wikipedia. Discussions are essential in collaborative work as they can increase contributor performance and encourage the emergence of shared norms and practices. While disagreements can play a productive role in discussions, they can also lead to conflicts and controversies, which impact contributor’ well-being and their motivation to engage. We want to understand if and when such phenomena arise in Wikidata, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify the types of topics people disagree about, the most common patterns of interaction, and roles people play when arguing for or against an issue. We find that decisions to create Wikidata properties are much faster than those to delete properties and that more than half of controversial discussions do not lead to consensus. Our analysis suggests that Wikidata is an inclusive community, considering different opinions when making decisions, and that conflict and vandalism are rare in discussions. At the same time, while one-fourth of the editors participating in controversial discussions contribute legitimate and insightful opinions about Wikidata’s emerging issues, they respond with one or two posts and do not remain engaged in the discussions to reach consensus. Our work contributes to the analysis of collaborative KG construction with insights about communication and decision-making in projects, as well as with methodological directions and open datasets. We hope our findings will help managers and designers support community decision-making and improve discussion tools and practices.