Wikidata
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. The database is published under CC0.
Purpose[edit]
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.
History and background[edit]
Before Wikidata existed, the section In other languages in the sidebar with links to articles in other languages were filled in manually on each single article. That eventually resulted in numerous interwiki conflicts and errors, and the more a subject was described in multiple languages, it was more complex to fix. Think about half a matrix of 300 languages resulting in 45000 unique combinations. For each article title change, potentially 300 Wikpedia language pages would need to be updated.
In October 2012 Wikidata went live. The wiki was empty of content and editors first started to import all the sitelinks with Wikipedia. Later also the sitelinks with other Wikimedia platforms.
Afterwards Wikidata became a generic triplestore database, to document the world.
Contacts[edit]
Wikimedia Belgium has no authority in Wikidata; it is the community of volunteers on Wikidata who makes the decisions and as the website is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Belgium is however 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[edit]
- 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
Projects in Belgium[edit]
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)
Related links[edit]
- Wikidata main page
- Article about Wikidata in Wikipedia
- Wikimedia Belgium in Wikidata: Q18398868
- Wikimedia Belgium in Reasonator: Wikimedia Belgium
- (nl) Hoe publiceer je rekenbladen of datasets met heemkundige informatie op Wikidata?, 2018 (archived)
- (en) Get your vocabularies in Wikidata..., Europeana, 1 September 2017 (archived)
- (en) Manual Wikidata for collection managers (also)
Documentation[edit]
- Introduction
- Tutorials about Wikidata (also available in Dutch and French)
- Glossary about Wikidata
- Wikidata in one page (info)
- Wikidata Query Service in Brief (info)
- The value of Wikidata for your GLAM institution
- The value of Wikidata for your research
- The value of Wikidata for your business
Tools[edit]
- OpenRefine - a free data wrangling tool that can be used to clean tabular data and connect it with knowledge bases, including Wikidata ((nl) version 3.1 archived)
- SPARQL query service - tool to search in the Wikidata database
- Pywikibot
- PetScan- tool for a variety of purposes
- QuickStatements - tool to automatically create or expand Wikidata items
Workshops[edit]
Instructional videos[edit]
Hoe Wikidata items aanmaken en bijwerken
Wikimedia koppelen met OpenStreetMap
