In the ten years since its launch, the free knowledge database Wikidata has become an indispensable part of the wiki project family. From the start, Wikidata’s development was a gamble with ambitious goals. Today, Wikidata is the largest collaboratively compiled collection of open data in the world.
The fact that the Knowledge Base has now been in existence for ten years is an international success story with roots in Germany. In 2012, Wikimedia Germany began building the knowledge base, which currently includes 100 million entries and is an indispensable interface for many institutions and projects, including the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Last but not least, Wikidata’s success is due to a community of more than 12,000 active volunteers who continuously revise and supplement data.
Wikidata has significant benefits for Wikipedia. Data stored there – birth dates of famous people as well as the population of cities, the location of a painting and much more – can be embedded in Wikipedia articles. A central update of such data in Wikidata also changes the data in all linked articles. Structured and machine-readable data is also easier to connect to other programs, apps or AI applications. Other projects and institutions also use Wikidata, including museums, libraries, academic institutions, start-ups and several technology companies.
Franziska Heine, Managing Director of Wikimedia Germany: “Data can enrich our lives – provided they are in an open, linkable and machine-readable format. In this context, Wikidata has the most compelling offer on the web, because the knowledge base thrives on it.” its international community of thousands of volunteers. Over the next decade, we want to continue working together to ensure that the technology we use every day is built on an open foundation, accessible to all, where everyone can contribute. Only in this way can being sustainable offer long-term access to free knowledge for everyone.”
The development team of…
