Wikidata

Logo 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.

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

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Related links

Wikibase UGent workshop July 2019

• Wikidata main page
• Article about Wikidata in Wikipedia
  • Wikidata in the English Wikipedia
  • Wikidata in the French Wikipedia
  • Wikidata in the Dutch 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

Wikidata voor beginners

• Introduction
• Tutorials about Wikidata (also available in Dutch and French)
• Glossary about Wikidata
• Wikidata:In one page
  • 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

Wikidata Query and Quickstatements

Setting up projects with Wikimedia tools

• 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
  • SPARQL tutorial
  • Interesting or illustrative queries (examples | examples)
• ListeriaBot
• Pywikibot
• PetScan- tool for a variety of purposes
• QuickStatements - tool to automatically create or expand Wikidata items
• Grafana statistics

Workshops

• Organising a Wikidata training
• Planning a Wikidata workshop

Instructional videos

• YouTube

• Hoe Wikidata items aanmaken en bijwerken
• Wikimedia koppelen met OpenStreetMap