Wikidata went live one year ago, on 29 October 2012. Because of the community's passion and hard work in building the project, Wikidata has progressed by leaps and bounds over the past year and is thriving today. In celebration of the project's first birthday, we have put together this page with some special notes and interviews to mark this momentous anniversary. We have a message for the community from development team product manager Lydia Pintscher, a state of the project op-ed by Sven Manguard, an interview with four administrators, and section on the right where you can share your own well-wishes with the community. Congratulations and best wishes for another great year!
A message from the development team
In 2005 Denny and Markus gave a talk at the very first Wikimania about their idea of a semantic Wikipedia. They had this dream of bringing the semantic web to Wikimedia to help improve Wikipedia and the other projects on various levels. Denny famously said back then that this would probably take someone who is familiar with MediaWiki about 2 weeks. Since then a lot has happened. (And well it took a bit longer than 2 weeks ;-)) Denny and Markus started the Semantic MediaWiki project and together with others gave MediaWiki the ability to "understand". Semantic MediaWiki is widely used in small and large wikis all over the world by now. Along the way they learned many lessons about how people use structured data in a wiki, how to handle it on a technical level and much more. Then, finally, in 2011 things fell into place and Denny got the opportunity to gather a team to develop Wikidata and bring structured data to Wikimedia. We started work in early 2012 and after a few months of work had the first things to show. One year ago today the website was launched and Q1 was created. In this past year so many great things have happened — too many to name them all. Looking back at what we all together have achieved in this short time still blows my mind. It is beyond what I could have hoped for when I said yes to joining the project. We have together:
removed more than 240 000 000 language links from the Wikipedias
created more than 21 000 000 statements
made more than 84 000 000 edits
become the 5th most active Wikimedia project with nearly 4000 active editors (5+ edits in the last 30 days)
nearly 600 editors who are very active (100+ edits in the last 30 days)
brought in nearly 5000 new Wikimedians for whom Wikidata is the first project they contributed to
Most importantly though, we as a community didn't just stop at the things the development team was able to provide. So many cool tools have already been built on top of Wikidata that show the power of a large repository of structured data – sometimes in ways we had not even thought of. Here's just a small subset of them:
We've together truly brought Wikimedia closer to its vision of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Thank you to everyone who joined us along the way so far. Thank you for being the most amazing community we could hope for. Here's to many more years to come. Here's to many more amazing things that will become possible through Wikidata. Happy birthday, Wikidata!
Lydia Pintscher, for the development team
State of the project op-ed
Sven Manguard prepared an op-ed, "State of the project: What we're doing right, what we're not, and what to look for in the year ahead", that reflects on where Wikidata is getting it right and what areas it needs to improve on in the coming year.
We interviewed four long time Wikidata contributors and administrators, Legoktm, Izno, 분당선M, and John F. Lewis, about their experiences with the project, and got their thoughts on Wikidata's greatest achievements and greatest shortcomings thus far.
* I remember the first day Wikidata was live, creating a few items like Q142. I was amazed by its potential. It has obviously changed a lot since then. Congrats to the Wikidata community and to everyone who made this possible! πr2 (t • c)00:06, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I was there since the beta-testing period. I missed some of the last days because of personal reasons, but I'm doing lots of efforts offline to bring more data to Wikidata. Because I believe in this project. :) --Sannita - not just another it.wiki sysop00:39, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Congratulations to the awesome community that made this vision a reality! Wikidata is just at its beginning, and I am looking very much forward to how it will continue to develop. Yay! --Denny (talk) 05:16, 29 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I can't express my feelings through words. Thank you and congratulations to all the volunteers and developers.........વિકિડેટા વર્ષગાંઠની ખૂબ ખૂબ શુભેચ્છા..--Vyom25 (talk) 17:29, 30 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I recall wanting something like this years ago. I asked on a talk page around 2008-2009, and got the answer it had already been proposed. Then one day in late 2012-early 2013 it was suddenly there. J 1982 (talk) 11:41, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
A very belated, but very enthusiastic happy birthday from me. It's awesome what's been done with this wiki in just a year, and how it's affected other Wikimedia wikis for the better. TCN7JM16:22, 3 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
