Some data on Wikidata

This weekend we saw the creation of the 7th Million item on Wikidata. We had already collected some data based on the Wikidata database dumps, but now we extended the scripts so that they can provide us with daily updates. We want to use this chance to publish a few statistics.

Within the last month – since statements got enabled – more than 660,000 of these items also got statements about them, resulting in more than 1.4 Million statements. The item with the most statements is the United Nations (Q1065), listing all member states. The growth of the number of statements is amazing and well beyond what we expected.

So far we have more than 22 Million links to Wikipedia articles. There are about 24-25 Million Wikipedia articles, which means that we have more than 90% of all links already in Wikidata. Assuming the bots continue working as efficiently as they did so far, all links could be transferred in about a month or two, and then the rapid growth in the number of items is expected to slow down considerably.

At the same time, the edits on Wikidata are increasing a lot. With more than 12.5 Million edits as of now, Wikidata is one of the most dynamic Wikimedia projects. One might say that this is all due to bot activity — but that would be very wrong. About 2 Million edits have been done by human editors, and actually the percentage of edits performed by human editors is increasing. More than 4,500 human editors have been active on Wikidata in the last thirty days.

Regarding labels and descriptions, Wikidata has collected more than 23 Million labels and more than 5 Million descriptions so far, in 333 languages. We see a great opportunity for external tools and websites to help us with collecting labels and descriptions, as they basically provide the translation of the content of Wikidata and make its content available in many languages simultaneously.

It is still too early to really understand what these numbers mean, but we can clearly state that the activity of the community exceeds the hopes of the development team. Although many features are still missing, the warm embrace of the Wikidata project in its current state by the Wikimedia communities is simply amazing, and I can only say “thank you” to those thousands and thousands of editors for their contribution to free knowledge.