Wikidata at Wikimania 2014 in London

Wikidata was one of the dominating themes at Wikimania 2014. Many talks mentioned it in passing, even those that didn’t focus on technical topics. Structured data with Wikibase were a topic that was often talked about, be it in discussions on the future of Wikimedia Commons or in projects that do something with GLAM.

When it comes to Wikidata, more and more people are beginning to see the light, so to say. It was fitting that Lydia Pintscher’s talk on Wikidata used this metaphor for the projects: creating more dots of light on the map of free knowledge.

Another excellent talk on Wikidata was dedicated to the research around it. Markus Krötzsch took us on a journey through the data behind the free knowledge base that anyone can edit.

Of course, there were meetups by the Wikidata community and hacks were developed during the hackathon. One enthusiastically celebrated project came from the Russian Wikipedia. Russian Wikipedia had infoboxes that come from Wikidata for quite some while now. What they added at the hackathon was the ability to edit data in the columns of these infoboxes in place — and change it on Wikidata at the same time, pretty much like a visual editor for Wikidata. Read about their hack on Wikidata, or have a look at the source code (which is still a long way from being easy to adopt to other Wikipedias, but it’s a start).