Wikidata:Fourth Birthday/Lydia

Today, Wikidata turns 4. Time to look back at the past year, look ahead towards what is coming next and of course celebrate.

Looking outside

The past year was the year Wikidata made its first steps into the mainstream. Here are just a few highlights:

• The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, used Wikidata’s data for their Oscar coverage.
• Yle, Finland's national public-broadcasting company, uses Wikidata’s concepts for language-independant tagging of their news articles.
• We had Wikidata editors in residence at TED, National Library of Wales and UNESCO.
• Europeana made Wikidata the center of their Europeana280 contest.
• A query about the occupation of the people mentioned in the Panama Papers spread like wildfire on social media. As did this Geography of Violence.
• Wikimedia Sverige, along with UNESCO, Wikimedia Italia and Cultural Heritage without Borders, has received a significant grant from Kulturstiftelsen (the Swedish postcode lottery) to work on the Connected Open Heritage project.
• WikiGenomes.org, an open, editable, and centralized model organism database for the biomedical research community that is powered by Wikidata, was launched.
• A lot more Wikipedia articles make use of Wikidata’s data - among them more than 11000 infoboxes for genes.
• Wikidata has been called the new Rosetta Stone.

We’ve reached the point where our data quality and quantity and tools are good enough for a lot of really interesting use cases, and the world is starting to notice!

Looking inside

Over the past year we made progress on a number of big topics: support for Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary, data quality, making Wikidata more accessible for more people, and most importantly giving more people more access to more knowledge.

Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary are the two biggest Wikimedia projects that we still need to support properly. For Wikimedia Commons this means making it possible to store all the metadata of a file like the license and what it shows as structured, machine readable data. Over the past year we’ve done a lot of groundwork for this and published the first demo system. For Wiktionary we went through another feedback round with the proposal and started working on automating the links between pages on different Wiktionary editions. There is still a long way to go for both projects but we’ve made good progress.

Data quality is hugely important for Wikidata. In the past this data quality has always been judged with the very crude measure of the number of statements that have a reference. However data quality on Wikidata is much more than that. The first step therefore was getting a better understanding of what it actually is. Nonetheless references are crucial so we set out to find ways to add more of them. One way is by automatically extracting them from reliable sources that mark up their texts to be read by machines. WikiCite, a conference about the future of citations in Wikimedia, also helped gain a better shared understanding of references and scholarly publications on Wikidata. Another piece of the data quality puzzle went live with ORES and ORES review tool. It helps to automatically classify edits to make it easier to spot and revert vandalism.

We’ve made Wikidata more accessible to more people via trainings, editathons, as well as improved documentation. The Wikidata community was present at numerous events throughout the year. Sessions about different Wikidata topics were offered at WikiCite in Berlin, Wikimania in Esino Lario, Wikicon in Stuttgart, WMCEE Meeting in Dilijan, a series of workshops in Paris and the Wikidata Tour Down Under to name just a few. For the improved documentation, have a look for example at the data donations page, the infobox tutorial, the Query Service help portal or Request a query.

I have always said that Wikidata is there to give more people more access to more knowledge and that this is what it should be judged on. I believe we’ve made great strides on this over the past year. We’ve added a mobile view to Wikidata, improved the user experience significantly and thereby making it usable by more people and made the Query Service much more useful by adding new features and making it easier to write queries. We’ve also thought about how to make it easier to edit Wikidata from Wikipedia for people who are not familiar with Wikidata. The most significant step towards giving more people more access to more knowledge I believe though we’ve made with the ArticlePlaceholder. It is currently rolled out in a first version on 9 Wikipedias (Esperanto, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Kannada, Latvian, Napolitan, Nynorsk, Odia and Welsh). It provides the readers of these Wikipedias with a data sheet for topics where no article exists in that language. With a bit more work over the next year, the ArticlePlaceholder will help them attract more readers, encourage more of them to become editors and ultimately share more knowledge in their language.

Looking ahead

Over the next year our main targets will be support for Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary, data quality, more support for Wikipedia as well as user experience improvements on Wikidata.

However, I think we need to look at the even bigger picture. It is more important than ever to bring people with different points of view to the same table and have a conversation about their differences. But instead, we as a society seem to be more and more partisan and thinking more and more in terms of right and wrong, true and false, black and white. The world is more complex and nuanced than this. We are at the point where we don’t even acknowledge differences in opinion anymore. But that is a necessary first step to being able to talk about them. And we as a society have a lot to talk about… With Wikidata we are building one of the building blocks of making it possible to surface and record different views. We need to talk more about it, push it further and get more people to make use of it.

With this I’d like to say Thank You for an amazing year and please stay awesome, open, lovely, enthusiastic and positive. We’re doing no less than changing the world together - every single day. Let’s celebrate!

<3
Lydia for the development team