Wikidata went live on 29 October 2012. Just like every year, we're celebrating its birthday together in late-October. You can organize a meetup in your area, prepare a birthday present for the community, or help us sharing enthusiasm with the hashtag #WikidataBirthday on social networks!
Events around the world
Nothing happening yet in your area? Feel free to organize a meetup and add it to the list!
Happy 7th birthday Wikidata 🎉🎈 And thanks to all of you for being awesome and caring so much about curating, organizing, reusing open data. We can be proud of what we collectively achieved here. Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 08:05, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Happy birthday! Best wishes for Wikidata and it's community. Next 65 000 000 items and reach at least 1 000 000 lexemes in next year! --Wargo (talk) 09:19, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Happy seventh Birthday to, as for me, the most interesting and distinctive Wikimedia project. 🎉🎂🍾 Let's continue helping the humankind to structure the knowledge... who if not us?;) #happyBirthdayWikidata --Wolverène (talk) 18:29, 29 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Here are the presents made by the community and the developers. These presents can be tools, but also other pieces of work like documentation, drawings, birthday song, blog post...
It’s Wikidata’s 7th birthday. Time to reflect and celebrate and to look forward to see where we are going from here.
Wikidata continues to grow. We have nearly 12000 active editors (5 or more edits in the past 30 days) now - up 1200 compared to last year. Together we are editing on about 64 million Items with a total of about 800 million statements. Compared to a year ago we know on average ½ a statement more about every single Item we are describing. And of course that data is used more both inside and outside Wikimedia. Today 56.35% of all articles in Wikimedia make use of data from Wikidata (excluding sitelinks) - with the highest usage rate on Wikivoyage projects. Outside Wikimedia people continue to build really cool projects with our data - from researching local history around witches to improved gene research, to connecting data about video games to improving library catalogs and more.
The four topics that have been especially prominent this year are lexicographical data, Structured Data on Commons, the Wikibase Ecosystem and data quality.
Lexicographical data: We don’t just describe concepts in Items on Wikidata but also words and their forms and meanings in Lexemes. This builds the basis for describing languages in a machine-readable way. Over the last year a lot of new Lexemes have been added and we are now describing over 204k Lexemes. The first languages are getting closer to reaching a critical mass so that meaningful apps, visualisations and more can be built on top of them.
Structured data on Commons: Over the last year the first pieces of Structured Data on Commons have been built by the Structured Data on Commons team and rolled out. It is now possible to describe files on Commons in a machine-readable way so that they will become easier to search and re-use. Wikidata’s Items and Properties are used as the vocabulary to describe those files. That means Commons relies on us to provide a decent vocabulary to do their work - as will others in the Wikibase Ecosystem later - and we will have to be mindful of their needs when creating, changing and removing parts of that vocabulary.
The Wikibase Ecosystem is all about the idea of building up a thriving ecosystem of Wikibase (the software running Wikidata) instances that are closely connected and exchanging data. With this we are empowering more people, organisations and companies to open up their data for collaborative editing on their terms. At the same time we are also taking pressure off of Wikidata to be the one place where linked open data happens. Over the past year a lot of interest has built up in GLAMs, especially libraries, but also for example the humanities, grassroots open data projects and sciences. There are efforts to evaluate and migrate to Wikibase going on in several places - among them the German National Library and the French National Library. The current Wikibase users are true trailblazers because they help us figure out where Wikibase is still too tightly coupled to Wikidata and iron out all the kinks that are still there.
Data quality: The quality of our data is consistently improving thanks to a ton of work by editors as well as new tools. The latest addition to the toolbox are EntitySchemas. They allow us to define how certain parts of the data in Wikidata should be modeled and then check them against existing Items to find outliers and fix them if needed. They are a useful tool for wiki projects to ensure consistent modeling in their domain.
What’s coming? Where do we go from here? The longer-term picture is laid out in the vision and strategy papers we published for feedback after Wikimania. More concretely over the next year this will mean:
Wikidata as a Platform: More and more people are exposed to the data we are collecting and rely on it to be of high quality. We will continue to work on improving the quality of Wikidata’s data together so that people can rely on it. We will also work on improving the accessibility of our data through things like an easier query builder. And last but not least we need to establish feedback processes with the medium-size and large re-users of our data to make sure that the issues they find and improvements they have flow back to the source and are available to everyone.
Wikibase Ecosystem: The work started with libraries will continue and expand to other areas like the sciences and more. As the Wikibase Ecosystem grows we will need to work on setting up good processes for collaboration and to clarify roles and responsibilities. And we will see the next steps for Federation by enabling other Wikibase instances to use Wikidata’s Properties to model their data.
Wikidata for Wikimedia projects: The first version of the Wikidata Bridge will make it possible for editors on the other Wikimedia projects to edit Wikidata directly from their project. This should lead to much tighter integration and hopefully an increase in usage of our data in the other Wikimedia projects. As this bond gets tighter we will also need to figure out ways to help people communicate with each other about the data and edits in Wikidata across language barriers.
Happy Birthday, Wikidata! Thank you for helping give more people, more access to more knowledge every single day. Here’s to many more years of opening up data, bridging gaps and empowering people.
