Wikidata

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The database is published under CC0. Other content as CC BY-SA. MediaWiki software as GNU GPL.

Logo Wikidata

Purpose

Wikidata has just like Wikipedia the goal of collecting, structuring, and distributing free knowledge. For Wikipedia this happens in the form of encyclopedic texts, in Wikidata it is structured and linked data. Wikimedia Commons stores media files, and has an instance of Structured data on Commons (SDoC). The 3 platforms are interconnected. They can all be updated via Pywikibot.

History and background

Before Wikidata existed, the section In other languages in the sidebar with links to articles in other languages were registered manually on each single article. That eventually resulted in numerous interwiki inconsistencies and errors, and the more a subject was described in multiple languages, it became more complex to fix. Think about half a matrix of 300 languages resulting in 45000 unique potential combinations. For each article title change, potentially more than 300 Wikpedia language pages would need to be updated.

In 29 October 2012 Wikidata went live. The wiki was empty of content and volunteers first started to import all the sitelinks from Wikipedia, removing the interwiki link content from the Wikipedia pages. Later also the sitelinks with other Wikimedia platforms were added. In 2018 the Structured Data on Commons (SDC) Wikibase instance was implemented. This allows creating sitelinks from Wikimedia Commons to Wikidata.

Afterwards Wikidata became a generic triplestore database, to document the world. The content can be reused on Wikipedia via infoboxes and other tools.

Functionality

Data model

The generic logical data model of Wikidata is 1 huge table and 3 columns: object item - property - subject item/value. The statements based on predicates form a triplestore or RDF database with which the whole world can be described. This can power artificial intelligence.

Useful gadgets

You can set the following via the user preferences option (by default disabled)

[ ] Merge: This script adds a tool for merging items
[ ] labelLister: Show and edit labels, descriptions and aliases from other languages
[ ] Reasonator: Adds a link to Reasonator on every item
[ ] EasyQuery: A tool to add an icon for finding items with same statements easier
[ ] relateditems: Adds a button to the bottom of item pages to display inverse statements
[ ] moveClaim: A tool to move or copy a statement from one entity to another

Contacts

Geertivp

Wikimedia Belgium has no authority in Wikidata; it is the community of volunteers on Wikidata who makes the decisions and the website is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Belgium is founded to support local volunteers and organisations in working with Wikidata and the other Wikimedia platforms, and we have years of experience in helping organisations with using Wikidata and adding data from collections to Wikidata.

Timeline

WikidataCon 2017 entrance

30 October 2012 - Start of Wikidata with first content
16 December 2014 - Freebase announced to retire and to move their data to Wikidata (FAQ) (archived)
26 March 2015 - VIAF is moving to Wikidata (archived)
28-29 October 2017 - WikidataCon in Berlin
Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 in Prague
Structured data on Commons

Projects in Belgium

Below is an incomplete list of projects done in Belgium on Wikidata.

October 2015-January 2016 - Import data from Flemish art collections to Wikidata (info)
March 2017- 2018 - Import data from the Kunstenpunt database to Wikidata (info)
September 2017-November 2017 - Import of the monuments of the Brussels Capital Region to Wikidata (info)
November 2017-May 2018 - Import of archive locations from Archiefbank Vlaanderen to Wikidata (info)
September-November 2018 - Import of the monuments of the German-speaking Community to Wikidata (info)
29 October 2018 - Wikidata workshop organised in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels (info | event page)
29 October 2018 - Wikidata 6th birthday party in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels (info | event page)
3-5 June 2019 - d:Wikidata:Events/UGent Wikidata and Wikibase Workshop 2019 (photos)

Known problems

This result is cached and can be outdated for up to 59 minutes: Refresh the cache via the "purge" option

Instructional videos

YouTube

Hoe Wikidata items aanmaken en bijwerken
Wikimedia koppelen met OpenStreetMap

Wikidata

Contents