Wikidata:Philosophy

Since Wikidata is a community-based project, there are at least as many philosophies as there are editors, readers, and participants generally.

The goal of Wikidata is to create and preserve "a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other Wikimedia projects, and well beyond that."

Therefore, what philosophical notions exist in the design and implementation of this project? What can be learned and interpreted from varying perspectives? How might or should these ideas change over time?

Hopefully this page and its discussion page can provide space to document, read, write, analyze, compare, and re-formulate the underlying philosophy of Wikidata as a burgeoning community data project.

Initial Design Decisions

In Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledge Base, authors Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch identify several "essential design decisions" serving as basic principles that "characterize the approach taken by Wikidata" at least in its beginnings. In this regard, Vrandečić and Krötzsch see Wikidata as a "specific kind of curated database" (my emphasis), as defined by Buneman et al as a term "normally reserved for those databases whose content (often about a specialized topic) has been collected by a great deal of human effort through the consultation, verification, and aggregation of existing sources, and the interpretation of new (often experimentally obtained) raw data."

• Open Editing
  • Like Wikipedia, Wikidata allows every user of the site to extend and edit the stored information, even without creating an account. A form-based interface makes editing very easy.
• Community Control
  • Not only the actual data but also the schema of the data is controlled by the contributor community. Contributors edit the population number of Rome, but they also decide that there is such a number in the first place.
• Plurality
  • It would be naive to expect global agreement on the ‘true’ data, since many facts are disputed or simply uncertain. Wikidata allows conflicting data to co-exist and provides mechanisms to organize this plurality.
• Secondary Data
  • Wikidata gathers facts published in primary sources, together with references to these sources. There is no ‘true population of Rome’, but a ‘population of Rome as published by the city of Rome in 2011’.
• Multilingual Data
  • Most data is not tied to one language: numbers, dates, and coordinates have universal meaning; labels like Rome and population are translated into many languages. Wikidata is multi-lingual by design. While Wikipedia has independent editions for each language, there is only one Wikidata site.
• Easy Access
  • Wikidata’s goal is to allow data to be used both in Wikipedia and in external applications. Data is exported through Web services in several formats, including JSON and RDF. Data is published under legal terms that allow the widest possible reuse.
• Continuous Evolution
  • In the best tradition of Wikipedia, Wikidata grows with its community and tasks. Instead of developing a perfect system that is presented to the world in a couple of years, new features are deployed incrementally and as early as possible.