{"id":3530,"date":"2013-04-24T16:00:31","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T20:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=3530"},"modified":"2013-04-24T19:07:42","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T23:07:42","slug":"3530","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2013\/04\/24\/3530\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wikidata Revolution: enabling structured data love"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata<\/strong><\/a> has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.<\/p>\n

By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata\u2019s universal, machine-readable\u00a0knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.<\/p>\n

\u201dWikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions.<\/em>\u00a0Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a\u00a0country\u2019s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, will automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.<\/em>\u201d – Sue Gardner<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on October 30, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links which previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions. Wikidata\u2019s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata\u2019s database with factual\u00a0statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world\u2019s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0Whether that\u2019s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.<\/em>\u201d –\u00a0Denny Vrande\u010di\u0107<\/a>, Wikidata project lead<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata\u2019s second year of development and maintenance.<\/p>\n

Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0<\/a> public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata\u2019s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]\u00b2<\/strong>, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc.<\/p>\n

More information available here:<\/p>\n