Denny Vrandečić, Lydia Pintscher, Markus Krötzsch

“ All three of them are closely tied to the development of the Web [8] , to which they have also made important individual contributions: community is the basis of the wiki principle [34] , sharing is the driving force of the open source and open knowledge movements, and explication through formal specification has motivated strong Web standards and the Semantic Web activity [7, 61] . Wikipedia naturally combines community and sharing, but Wikidata has pioneered the reconciliation of all three ideals. ”

“ Most prominently, Abstract Wikipedia is working towards extending knowledge representation beyond Wikidata such that one can abstractly capture the contents and structure of Wikipedia articles. Building on top of the data and lexicographic knowledge in Wikidata, these abstract representations will then be used to generate encyclopedic content in many more languages, providing a baseline of knowledge in the hundreds of languages of Wikipedia. ”

“ Potentially disruptive software changes were out of the question, and technical work focused on core functionality (UI, account management, discussion pages, backend performance) . Even those more meager innovations were not always welcomed by the growing community, resulting in conflicts between the Wikimedia Foundation and contributors. Adding data management to Wikipedias’ core tasks seemed a huge risk, especially as some communities became more conservative and less open to such changes. ”

“ Nevertheless, the actual data sets are completely different, both in their vocabulary and their underlying data model. In comparison to other approaches, Wikidata has one of the richest graph formats, where each statement (edge in the graph) can have user-defined annotations (e.g., validity time) and references.
Today, Wikidata is at the core of the Wikimedia projects, a central resource of the world-wide knowledge ecosystem, and an integral part of technologies the world uses every day. Basic statistics are summarized in Table 1. ”

“ Editors need continued support to maintain data quality and increase coherence, an everlasting challenge in an open and dynamic system. Together with easier access methods, this should enable more applications, services, and research on top of the data and increase Wikidata’s impact further. In addition, Wikidata still has a long way to go to fully realize its potential as a support system for the Wikimedia projects. ”

“ Wikidata grew. Crucial functionality was added, the community grew, and the content was expanded alongside many initial data modeling discussions. This growth was intentionally managed to be slow and steady, in order to build a healthy project, created and supported by a sustainable community. ”

“ Community: all content (data and schema) is directly controlled by an open community, not by the development team at Wikimedia Deutschland Sharing: the data is licensed under Creative Commons CC-0, which imposes no restrictions on usage or distribution Explication: content is structured according to its own data model, is exported in the RDF standard, and is open to machine reading/writing through APIs In addition to these fundamentals, Wikidata is also characterized by several further design choices:
Multi-linguality: One Wikidata serves all languages ”

“ Wikidata development has been supported with donations by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Yandex, and IBM. Wikimedia relies on small donations from millions of people to keep their services (including Wikidata) up and running, and we specifically want to thank all individuals who have directly contributed in this way. ”

“ Community: the confidence that sensible people will work together to make the world a better place Sharing: the goal of making knowledge, and digital resources in general, freely available to every human Explication: the goal to formally specify information in explicit, unambiguous, and machine-processable ways These ideals are neither universally accepted nor free of internal conflicts, but they continue to inspire. ”

“ Its goal is to enable applications and services on top of Wikidata, as well as to support the editor community, especially in improving data quality. Originally, Vrandečić had not planned for a SPARQL query service, as he did not think that any of the available Open Source solutions would be performant enough to support Wikidata. Fortunately he was wrong, and today the SPARQL query service has become an integral part of the Wikidata ecosystem. ”

“ Moreover, most other online databases, authority fles, and ontologies were also preferring abstract IDs. De-coupling a concept’s name from its ID can increase stability (since IDs do not change if names do) , but studies found that Wikipedia article titles often are rather stable identifiers [20] . More importantly, however, the founders of Wikidata did not want to use an anglo-centric solution, nor suggest the use of many different language-specific identifiers (such as dbp:東京都) for the same Item. ”

“ With those bots gone, humans were suddenly better able to ‘see’ each other and build a more meaningful community. In many languages, this eventually led to an increased community activity. In addition to reducing the maintenance burden on the Wikipedias, this also lead to the creation of Items on Wikidata for a large number of general concepts represented by each of these articles, and thereby helped bootstrap the content of Wikidata. ”

“ One of them was Ontoprise, a Karlsruhe-based SME subcontracted by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. under the leadership of Mark Greaves to adapt SMW for knowledge acquisition in the ambitious Halo project [18] . To support development and community outreach, Ontoprise hired a local computer science student, Lydia Pintscher.
5. EVOLUTION OF AN IDEA
While SMW was moving along its own trajectory, the greater goal was, however, not abandoned. Between 2005 and 2012, through interactions with many people, the original Semantic Wikipedia evolved to the first accurate concept of Wikidata. ”

“ A cross-verifed database of notable people, 3500BC-2018AD. Scientific Data 9, 1 (June 2022) , 19 pages. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01369-4 Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. 2001. The Wiki way: Quick collaboration on the Web. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, USA. Andrew Lih. 2019. Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale. The Met. Retrieved 14 Nov 2022 from https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2019/wikipedia-art-and-ai Robin Linderborg. 2021. How we’re tracking elections in symbiosis with Wikidata. ”

“ In Proceedings of the Conference on Digital Curation Technologies (Qurator 2020) , Berlin, Germany, January 20th - 21st, 2020 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2535) , Adrian Paschke, Clemens Neudecker, Georg Rehm, Jamal Al Qundus, and Lydia Pintscher (Eds.) . CEUR-WS.org, 9 pages. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2535/paper_7.pdf Erik M. van Mulligen, Erik Möller, Peter-Jan Roes, Marc Weeber, Gerard Meijssen, and Barend Mons. 2006. ”

“ Kalyan Dutia and John Stack. 2021. Heritage connector: A machine learning framework for building linked open data from museum collections. Applied AI Letters 2, 2 (2021) , e23. Fredo Erxleben, Michael Günther, Markus Krötzsch, Julian Mendez, and Denny Vrandečić. 2014. Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web. In Proceedings of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC’14) (LNCS, Vol. 8796) , Peter Mika, Tania Tudorache, Abraham Bernstein, Chris Welty, Craig A. Knoblock, Denny Vrandečić, Paul T. Groth, Natasha F. Noy, Krzysztof Janowicz, and Carole A. Goble (Eds.) . ”