User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE)/Second Birthday

Wikidata is turning two today.

Let's take a look back at what we achieved over the last year. We have continued to build and grow an amazing community and project. Within two years we have become one of the household names for free and open data about the world. At this point nearly 13.000 people edit Wikidata every month. We are collecting data about nearly 13 million concepts that is viewed nearly 60 million times a month. We are serving several hundred languages. Wikidata is improving in quality and quantity every single day. This is an amazing success.

Over the past year we have added new features (e.g. ranks, quantities datatype, monolingual text datatype, badges, merges and redirects, “in other projects” sidebar), worked on countless others and improved existing ones. We started supporting more sister projects by giving them access to the data on Wikidata. At the same time more experiments have started around Wikidata’s data and tools and applications have been built that demonstrate what Wikidata is capable of. The Wikidata Game is one of them. It is evolving and in the near future a similar concept will be shown to Wikipedia readers on their mobile phones to help expand our knowledge base. Histropedia is using data from Wikidata to enhance their timelines with useful information or to build new ones. Researchers are making Wikidata the central hub for linked open life science data. The Russian Wikipedia is experimenting with editing information on Wikidata directly from their articles. Some Wikipedias are enhancing their search result via Wikidata. Qlabel helps you to create multilingual websites with the help of Wikidata. And many many more. Over the past year we have also seen a shift in the public perception of Wikidata. We’ve gone from a project that might or might not matter to one that definitely does. This could be seen at Wikimania in London for example where Wikidata was everywhere. Or in recognitions like the recent nomination for the Open Data Awards. All these pieces are key in our mission to provide free knowledge to everyone.

As a two-year old we are not perfect. Over the next year we need to concentrate on a few things in my opinion:

• Wikidata’s data is not yet used enough on the other Wikimedia projects. In order to be able to maintain our data and keep it in good shape this needs to change. We need more eyes on the data. At this point roughly 15% of all articles make use of Wikidata in some way. This includes things like checking if a locally defined value is the same as the one on Wikidata.
• We need to be careful to not fall into the trap of collecting all the data we can find. We need to start concentrating more on the quality of the data we already have through initiatives like the showcase items.
• We need to continue building the missing features that are crucial for the project to continue to flourish.

What does the future hold? Many amazing things! Wikidata will continue to grow in relevance and expand its place as a central key piece of infrastructure in Wikimedia and beyond. We will work on improving the quality of our data and build more trust in it and we will make the website more user-friendly. We will have to adapt to the fact that our data is being used and especially need to support the re-use of our data inside Wikimedia more.

This second birthday is also a good opportunity to remind ourselves why we are doing all this. We are building a multilingual knowledge base that allows us to give more people more access to more knowledge - every single day. With each new edit on Wikidata we are helping someone gain knowledge - no matter what language they speak.

We should be proud of what we already achieved! Exciting times are ahead of us. The world is starting to realize what we knew since the beginning of Wikidata two years ago: Wikidata is changing the world.

Happy birthday, Wikidata! Here's to many more amazing years and successes for you. Stay innovative, passionate, caring, smart, forgiving, open, trustworthy and surprising - in short: stay awesome!

Cheers
Lydia, for the development team