The fact that the knowledge base has now existed for ten years is an international success story with roots in Germany. In 2012, Wikimedia Deutschland began to develop the knowledge base that contains 100 million items at present and is an indispensable interface for many institutions and projects, among them the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wikidata’s success is not least due to a community of more than 12,000 active volunteers who continuously revise and add data.
Wikidata has significant benefits for Wikipedia. Data stored there – birthdates of famous people as well the population figures for cities, the exhibition site of a painting, and much more – can be embedded in Wikipedia articles. A centralized update of such data in Wikidata also changes the data in all linked articles. It is also easier to connect structured and machine-readable data with other programmes, apps or AI applications. Other projects and institutions also use Wikidata, among them museums, libraries, science institutions, start-ups and several technology companies.
Franziska Heine, Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland: “Data can enrich our lives – provided it is available in an open, linkable and machine-readable format. Wikidata has the most convincing offer on the web in this context, because the knowledge base thrives on its international community of thousands of volunteers. Over the next ten years, we want to continue to ensure together that the technology we use every day is built on an open base accessible to all, where everybody can contribute. This is the only way to sustainably offer access to free knowledge for all in the long run.”
The development team at Wikimedia Deutschland currently works on various projects to keep supporting Wikidata in future. In order to achieve this, additional efforts in the area of data quality are crucial. In addition, we are working on making data in Wikidata more accessible to programmers in order to continue to support many new programmes, apps and services based on Wikidata’s data in the years to come.
Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org
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