User:John F. Lewis/Presence

2014 is here! Wikidata celebrated it's 1st birthday last October. Currently, Wikidata aims to provide centralisation of Wikimedia data for reuse on every project. In my opinion, Wikidata is a major contributor to the goal of Wikimedia;

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge

Wikidata itself may not be aiming towards increasing the availability of the worlds knowledge, but it is definitely allowing other projects to do that. Looking at statistics, The English Wikipedia is the largest language version of Wikipedia with over 4 million articles. The smallest Wikipedia is the Herero language Wikipedia with 0 articles. This is a massive difference and the lack of editors available in one language severely impedes the Wikimedia Foundation allowing the worlds knowledge to be freely available. This is where Wikidata comes in however. Using Wikidata on the Herero language Wikipedia could in theory bring the article count up to exactly match the English Wikipedia's. However, we as a global community need to come together to promote Wikidata in our own language and help the smaller Wikipedias to make use of Wikidata.

Why? To meet the Wikimedia Foundation's goal. For every Wikipedia which lacks an article, that could make the difference between an education in countries where are either too poor to provide a free or funded educations similar to larger countries or those in rural areas. In 2014, the internet become a more popular educational tool however in return, the internet also becomes more popular to vandals and trolls which give Wikipedia it's name of the most unreliable research tool available. Whether Wikipedia is or is not reliable can all change as we integrate Wikidata into more communities. Administrators ensure the local community remains vandalism free, this is the exact same case with Wikidata. Our administrative team aim to ensure Wikidata is only reliable and vandalism is kept off as it has no place here. Our policies are always affected by a local communities policy as we centralise Wikimedia, our policies will become more central to the point where the same topic is notable everywhere. Oppression by certain political groups will also become less common on Wikipedia as more data is shared and received through Wikidata ever growing technology.

Wikidata is still in development, every single suggestion is taken into consideration by the development team and if they improve Wikidata, they are done. The recent implementation of 'ranks' allows the community to become an archive and also an up to date reference allowing a community to choose between using only one figure or all figures every recorded. Wikidata is still, new and in development however, Wikidata has the ability to change the world for the better. I ask you all to help me this year make Wikidata more used on every Wikimedia project possible and I reach out to the development team to also support the community by prioritising development features for us and not for implementation sakes. Similar with sister projects being implemented. In 2014, I ask everyone comes together and lets make Wikidata an integral part of Wikimedia for the better. John F. Lewis (talk) 00:59, 1 January 2014 (UTC)


This is the main page for the overall project I wish to focus on for 2014 for Wikidata. Below will be a list of all sub pages within this sub page. Titles are hopefully descriptive.