User:John Cummings/Archive/Data partnerships

This page is written for institutions, companies, organisations and individuals who are interested in adding data to Wikidata. If you have questions please ask them on the partnerships and data imports discussion page.

About Wikidata

Wikidata aims to create a multilingual free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files, it is also used by many other websites. The data on Wikidata is added by a community of volunteers both manually and by using software, much like other Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. Wikidata has millions of items, each representing a human, a place, a painting, a concept, etc. Each item has statements (key-value pairs), each statement in turn consisting of a property such as "birth date", and the appropriate value for the item. Likewise, there can be statements for external IDs, such as a VIAF identifier. Wikidata is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

What data we host

Wikidata focuses on a basic level of useful information about the world and links to both other resources for specialized data and images hosted on Wikimedia Commons on the subject. Sources for data on Wikidata must be: Reliable Up to date Publicly available The best way to find out which parts of your data is suitable for Wikidata is to contact the Wikidata community.

Why add data to Wikidata

There are many reasons to add data to Wikidata including:

Help more people to see your information Data from Wikidata is used by many high traffic websites including Wikipedia which is one of the most used websites in the world receiving over 15 billion page views per month.

Improve open knowledge Wikidata hosts data that can be used on Wikimedia projects and beyond. By adding data to Wikidata you can ensure the data on your subject is well covered and up to date in all Wikimedia project languages.

Increase traffic to your website Anyone looking at Wikidata or other sites that use Wikidata including Wikipedia can see the reference link for the source of the data.

Make your data more useful for yourself and others By adding data to Wikidata it becomes more useful, you can: Combine with it other data Use Wikidata tools to explore the data Visualise your data along with data from other sources

Organisations who have worked with Wikidata

Case studies Many organisations are choosing to work with Wikidata, case studies are available on the following projects: Flemish Art Collections: In this project, a group of Flemish museums and art collections publish metadata of their art collections (estimated: 25,000 artworks in total) on Wikidata, and then make this dataset available as Linked Open Data (LOD)

Organisations whos data has been added data to Wikidata Data from many organisations has been added to Wikidata, these include: BBC: Your Paintings British Museum: Thesaurus National Library of Australia: People identifier Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie: artist biographies UNESCO: Programme inscriptions e.g World Heritage Sites National Nuclear Data Center: Nuclide stability, natural abundance, decays and half life.

Wikidata and copyright

All data on Wikidata is licensed as Creative Commons CC0 (public domain) however Individual facts and identifiers, such as numbers and IDs are not copyrightable. If you are an institution based in Europe, the whole of your ID list may be under database copyright, but we would not be copying the entire list in bulk; rather, volunteers add most of them individually, one at a time. Every database is different, to define wether your organisation would need to make a license change on your data or if the section of data you would like to make available does not fall under copyright please contact the Wikidata community. For more information please see the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidance on database rights.

Reusing and combining Wikidata data

There are many tools to manipulate data on Wikidata, for a full list see the Wikidata external tools and the Tools Directory.

Reusing data You can use our data including translated names, birth/death dates and locations, free images, you name it. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access

Matching your data with other data sets Many tools exist to augment or cross-check your data with data from other sources. One example is BEACON which can give you a list of your IDs matched against any other we have for the same items, e.g "BBC Your Paintings" artists against VIAF.

Visualisations Several tools exist to visualise Wikidata data including: Histropedia: uses data from Wikipedia and Wikidata to automatically generate interactive timelines with events linked to Wikipedia articles. Example: The Apollo missions Reasonator: a more advanced search and display of Wikidata items. Example: Johann Sebastian Bach GeneaWiki: a simple graph viewer showing genealogy information in WikiData. Example

How to add data to Wikidata

The process of adding Wikidata can be be technically challenging but the Wikidata community is very happy to discuss with you the best approach and offer assistance where needed, the basic process is:

1. Contact the Wikidata community describing what data you have and would like to include on Wikidata.
2. Decide with the Wikidata community what data is suitable to import.
3. Work with the Wikidata community to import the data

1. Contact the Wikidata community

There is a central noticeboard for contacting the Wikidata community called Project chat. Create a Wikimedia account (do not use the name of an organisation in the title). Make sure you are logged in Go to the Project chat page. Click the blue Start a new discussion button. Write a message and make sure to include a title in the title line. Sign the message using ~~~~ Click Show preview underneath your message to make sure your message has been written correctly, you will see that your username has appeared where the ~~~~ were added. Click Save page to post the message. Users will either reply to your message on the Project chat page or on your userpage which you can access by clicking Talk at the top of the screen next to your username. Please note pages become archived after a short while to make room for new messages, to access old messages go to the Archive index.

2. Decide with the Wikidata community what data to import.

Wikidata does not include all data available A link to Wikidata policy

3. Work with the Wikidata community to import the data

There are several ways to add data to Wikidata including

Manual data entry Everyone can add data to Wikidata by manually adding the data.

Online tools A set of online tools exist to import data sets into Wikidata, guidance on using this tools will be made available soon.

Wikidata API The Wikidata API is a web service that provides convenient access to wiki features, data, and meta-data over HTTP.

Bots Bots (also known as robots) are tools used to make edits without the necessity of human decision-making. Bots on Wikidata can add interwiki links, labels, descriptions, statements, sources, and can even create items, among other things.

Other ways organisations can be involved with Wikimedia

There are a number of ways organisations can be involved with Wikimedia including: Making media content available Contributing to Wikipedia articles Hosting Wikimedia events Host a Wikimedian in Residence For more information contact your local Wikimedia chapter

Useful links

About Wikidata An introduction to Wikidata Community Portal A glossary of Wikidata terms Wikidata Tool Directory Create a Wikimedia account (do not use the name of an organisation in the title).