Wikidata:Third Birthday/Dev Team Message
The third year has been an exciting one for Wikidata - one of struggles, breakthroughs and ❤︎. Our mission is to give more people more access to more knowledge. Everything we do comes back to this, and this is by what we should be judged. I want to take a moment to reflect with you on what we have achieved, and where we are going next.
What happened over the past year? We stayed true to who we are whilst growing![edit]
We have gained more acceptance and recognition both inside and outside of Wikimedia. Inside of Wikimedia, we have seen many projects have important discussions on their use of Wikidata’s data - like the German-language Wikipedia agreeing to conditional use or the English-language Wikipedia agreeing to deprecate their persondata template. Many Wikipedias and other sister projects are starting to adapt their articles to make use of Wikidata’s data like the Hungarian, French or English language Wikipedias, and we have studies showing how to do even better. None of this has come easily, but we did it and it was worth it!
The same is happening outside of Wikimedia. 3rd parties are moving to Wikidata, like VIAF and MusicBrainz. We achieved this among other things by making it easier for them to embrace us through dedicated places. And we engage with significant events, like the World Health Summit this year. The most impactful decision of this year though was probably Google’s decision to close Freebase in favour of Wikidata. We have embraced it as an opportunity to grow and make Wikidata more useful while at the same time making sure our community stays healthy. (People before data!) This was no small feat, but we did it and we should be proud of it. All this hard work was also recognised. We won two prizes: the Open Data Award and Land der Ideen.
With Wikidata becoming more useful and accepted, we have also seen many tools and initiatives pop up that have now become possible. I can't name them all but will just give a very brief selection: Mix'n'match helps us connect to other databases by making it easy to match up an external database’s record with one in Wikidata. The Wikidata Game allows people to make thousands of small contributions to grow our knowledge base, even on mobile phones. AskPlatypus answers questions about the world with the help of Wikidata. Inventaire brings the world closer together, allowing people to share books – enriched by Wikidata’s data. Histropedia makes it possible to visualize our history – also made possible by Wikidata. And even silly and cute little things like @happybdauthors suddenly are just a few lines of code away.
We also dared to venture into new fields. We made Wikidata a hub for linked open life science data, reached the milestone of 100.000 paintings through the Sum of all Paintings WikiProject, collaboratively and openly wrote a huge research proposal and wrote an artificial neural network to help Wikidata.
We untied a few really hard knots on the technical side as well. The most important ones being a query service, support for units, access to data from arbitrary items, language fallbacks, mobile support and statements on properties.
All of this together has helped us to provide more and better data. We increased the number of statements from 49 million to 70 million, and at the same time improved the percentage of statements with a useful reference from 13% to nearly 20%. 50% of our items have three or more statements now - up from 43% one year ago. This means Wikidata knows significantly more about the world. And the percentage of items with labels in at least five languages increased from 23% to 26%, meaning Wikidata’s content is understandable by more people.
This has been made possible by all of us working together! Roughly 6500 people make 5 or more contributions to Wikidata each month and roughly 1000 of them even more than 100 edits.
Oh and the third year is also the year we were finally able to answer the question that started it all ;-)
What is coming? We will turn it up a notch![edit]
There is still so much to do. And that is what makes Wikidata exciting and worthwhile for me — seeing how together we make progress, creating something beautiful that changes the world. Amongst the things we still need to do are improving the user interface, provide better tools for data maintenance and quality work, and integrate better with all the other Wikimedia projects, help bring them more closely together. We will need to build out our social structures, like WikiProjects, to make them scale better and keep the project healthy. I also want us to become a better citizen of the Linked Open Data Web by no longer being a dead-end, but instead a vibrant hub in it.
The coming year will be expansive, delighting and awesome. It will be the year in which I want us to make significant headway in our mission of giving more people more access to more knowledge. So far we have done great at improving infrastructure and access for projects and people who are usually already advantaged when it comes to access to knowledge. Over the coming year we need to put effort into improving the situation for everyone else. We need to for example make true on our promise to support the smaller Wikipedias and the other sister projects more. We will do this through efforts like the article placeholder. It will provide information to the readers of a Wikipedia when it does not have an article. This, my hope, will make these Wikipedias more useful, attract more editors and ultimately give more people more access to more knowledge. Together, we can do this!
Here is to another great year. Stay as awesome as you are!
Lydia and the development team
