Wikidata celebrated its 8th birthday, and as every year the decentralized birthday celebrations brought together a community from all around the globe. This year, the community experimented with a new format: a 24 hours-long online call with different workshops and talks.
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Happy Birthday, Wikidata! The open knowledge base is turning eight. Since it came into being, the project developed by Wikimedia Deutschland in intensive collaboration with an international community has made enormous progress. In the following interview, Lydia Pintscher, Wikidata product manager, talks about Wikidata’s beginnings, milestones and plans for the future.
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OPEN!NEXT is a research project funded by the European Union that researches and promotes open hardware. It is intended to help users and companies to create hardware collaboratively and on the basis of open standards. Wikimedia Deutschland is one of the project partners.
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The Wikidata community strives to improve the quality of its data and to balance its coverage. The application ProWD is a tool that detects data gaps and imbalances in Wikidata. In the following interview, Nadyah Hani and Refo Ilmiya, who worked on the tool as their final thesis in computer science, explain how ProWD fills the gaps.
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Wikimedia Deutschland not only supports the community of volunteers who are active on Wikipedia and its sister projects. The team software development also works to improve the technology behind the projects. You can now help to make it better.
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Languages are powerful instruments to create community, share knowledge and preserve heritage. Also in technology, language is important to store and share information, be it for education, on social platforms, or with voice assistants. Yet, some smaller languages are increasingly under threat of disappearing. That’s why Wikidata strives to promote linguistic diversity and multilingualism in the Wikimedia projects and beyond.
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The Occitan language or lenga d'òc is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, a region that spans parts of southern France as well as Monaco and parts of Spain and Italy. Today, it is mostly spoken as a second language. Preserving a regional language in the age of the Internet is not a small task, but fortunately digitization offers new possibilities.
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In July, Wikimedia Deutschland was among the organizers of a three-day workshop in Ghent, Belgium. Together with Micelio, and with the support of the Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities, WeChangEd ERC project, Science Stories, and the IDLab, institutions and teams from various fields learned how to install Wikibase, the software behind Wikidata, to model data, and to upload it to their Wikibase installation.
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WikidataCon, the first conference dedicated to the Wikidata community took place in Berlin on October 28th and 29th. How to summarize this event? It was a huge success, both from the point of view of the community and the organizing team, and we hope that you enjoyed the event as much as we did.
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