Marius Hoch
| Tags | Third Parties, Wikidata |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Knowledge as a Service |
| Secondary Sessions |
Making use of Wikidata's knowledge on Wikimedia projects and beyond
It is foreseeable that the way our content will be consumed is going to change a lot in the next years, as both the demographics of the internet as well as the devices used by our readers are changing. We should try to adapt to this by offering our content in ways best suited for many user scenarios. In order to achieve this, we need to modularize and structure our content so that it can be easily re-interpreted and used in many different ways.
Wikidata gives us the possibility to easily cater for this trend, by providing machine readable data about any subject, which can be formatted and presented in a wide variety of ways and languages. Wikidata makes it possible to more easily maintain up to date information on subjects in many languages, without the burden of manual data maintenance.
We should strengthen this by improving the integration of Wikidata with other Wikimedia projects, providing easy ways to use and profit from Wikidata especially for small communities and by making the power of Wikidata more visible. While all Wikimedia communities will profit from this, it can be especially worthwhile for small communities, that currently don't have the resources for managing data, like Infoboxes, themselves.
Example projects that will help in this area are the 'ArticlePlaceholder', that allows serving Wikidata-data about a certain subject if there's no article about it. Also the plans for automatic Infoboxes derived solely from Wikidata and other means of using Wikidata-data on Wikimedia projects. While both of these projects can have a big community impact, they need to fit in with the current infrastructure. Also they pose certain new scalability and data presentation challenges that need to be addressed.
Furthermore, Wikidata's information should be easy to reuse by third party projects to increase visibility and in order to gain contributions and data donations, making Wikidata the true data hub of the internet. This goal raises longstanding issues with the current Wikimedia dump infrastructure, which is neither very flexible nor does it provide a machine readable interface for data consumers. Also bringing more individual editors and organizations into Wikidata poses various infrastructure and scalability issues coping with the sheer amount of data and changes happening, as well as providing convenient tools for establishing and maintaining data quality.
