Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way
- Wikidata is arguably one of Wikipedia's most successful sister projects. It has had a profound impact on Wikipedia in just a few years. Lydia Pintscher is the Product Manager for Wikidata at Wikimedia Germany. This essay was first published at Wikipedia @20 and has been licensed by the author CC-BY SA 3.0
In 2012, Wikipedia had grown and achieved so much in over a decade of creating an encyclopedia. But it was also at a point where fundamental change was needed: The world around Wikipedia was changing and Wikimedia had to find ways to make its content more accessible and support its editors in maintaining an ever increasing body of content in over 250 languages. The vision of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge was not achievable in this scattered way.
Ever since 2005 at the very first Wikimania, Wikimedia’s annual conference, one idea kept coming up: to make Wikipedia semantic and thus make its content accessible to machines. Machine-readability would enable intelligent machines to answer questions based on the content and make the content easier to reuse and remix. For example, it was not possible to easily find an answer to the question of what are the biggest cities with a female mayor because the necessary data was distributed over many articles and not machine-readable. Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch kept working on this idea and created Semantic MediaWiki, learning a lot about how to represent knowledge in a wiki along the way. Others had also started extracting content from Wikipedia, with varying degrees of success, and making the information available in machine-readable form.
So when the first line of code for the software that came to power Wikidata was written in 2012, it was an idea whose time had come. Wikidata was to be a free and open knowledge base for Wikipedia, its sister projects and the world that helps give more people more access to more knowledge. Today, it provides the underlying data for a lot of technology you use and the Wikipedia articles you read every day.
Being able to influence the world around you is such an important and empowering thing and yet we are losing this ability a bit more everywhere every day. More and more in our daily lives depends on data so lets make sure it stays open, free and editable for everyone in a world where we put people before data. Wikipedia showed how it can be done and now its sister Wikidata joins to contribute a new set of strengths.