Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

29 October 2024

Happy Twelfth Birthday Wikidata!

Today the global Wikidata community is celebrating its 12th birthday! Wikidata originally went live on the 29th October 2012, back when Andrew Gray was the British Library’s first Wikipedian in Residence and since then it has massively expanded.  

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines, which acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia and Wikisource. Wikidata content is available under a free license (CC0), exported using standard formats (JSON & RDF), and can be interlinked to other open data sets on the linked data web.

Drawing of four people around a birthday cake

Over the past year Wikidata passed the incredible milestone of 2 Billion edits, making it the most edited Wikimedia project of all time. However, this growth has created Wikidata Query Service stability challenges and scaling issues. To address these, the development team have been working on several projects including splitting the data in the Query Service and releasing the multiple languages code to be able to handle the current size of Wikidata better.

Heat Map of Wikidata’s geographic coverage as of October 2024
Map of Wikidata’s geographic coverage as of October 2024

Another major focus during the past year has been promoting Wikidata reuse. To make it easier to access Wikidata’s data there is a new REST API. Plus developers who build with Wikidata’s data now have access to a Wikidata developer portal, which holds important information and provides inspiration about what is possible with Wikidata’s data.

The international library community actively engages with Wikidata. In 2019 the IFLA Wikidata Working Group was formed to explore the integration of Wikidata and Wikibase with library systems, and alignment of the Wikidata ontology with library metadata formats such as BIBFRAME, RDA, and MARC. There is also the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group, who hold Affinity Group Calls and Wikidata Working Hours throughout the year.

If you are new to Wikidata and want to learn more, there are many resources available, including this Zine about Wikidata, created by our recent Wikimedian in Residence Dr Lucy Hinnie, and these videos:

You may also want to check out the online Bibliography of Wikidata, which lists books, academic conference presentations and peer-reviewed papers, which focus on Wikidata as their subject.

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom.

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