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;The Wikidata revolution is here - enabling structured data on Wikipedia
;British Library Wikipedian in Residence - conclusions


[[File:Wikidata-logo-en.svg|thumb|200px|right|Wikidata logo]]
[[File:Alexander in a submarine - British Library Royal MS 15 E vi f20v (detail).jpg|thumb|250px|right|Library curators exploring a new world (or, Alexander the Great being lowered into the water in a submarine); BL Royal MS 15 E vi f20v.]]


''This post was written by Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst of the Wikimedia Foundation. It was [http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/the-wikidata-revolution/ originally posted on the Foundation’s blog here].''
''This post was written by Andrew Gray at the conclusion of his residency at the British Library. It was [http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/05/wikipedian-in-residence-conclusions.html originally posted on the British Library’s blog here].''


A year after [https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/30/the-wikipedia-data-revolution/ its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006], Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.
My residency at the British Library is coming to an end today, and so it seemed a good chance to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s been a very productive and very interesting year.
By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.


“Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. “Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, can automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.
The residency was [http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2012/05/wikimedia-uk-and-british-library-unveil-latest-wikipedian-in-residence/ funded by the AHRC], who aimed to help find ways for researchers and academics to engage with new communities through Wikipedia, and disseminate the material they were producing as widely as possible. To help with this, we organised a series of introductory workshops; these were mostly held at the British Library, with several more at the University of London (two at Birkbeck and three at Senate House) and others scattered from Southampton to Edinburgh. Through the year, these came to fifty sessions for over four hundred people, including almost a hundred Library staff both in London and at Boston Spa, and another fifty Library readers in London! Attendees got a basic introduction to Wikipedia – how it works, how to edit it, and how to engage with its community – as well as the opportunity to experiment with using the site.


The Wikidata entry on Johann Sebastian Bach (as displayed in the “Reasonator” tool), containing among other data the composer’s places of birth and death, family relations, entries in various bibliographic authority control databases, a list of compositions, and public monuments depicting him.
As well as building a broad base of basic skills and awareness, we also worked with individual projects to demonstrate the potential for engagement in specific case. At the Library, the International Dunhuang Project organised a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BL/IDP/Report multi-day, multi-language, editing event] in October; IDP staff, student groups, and Wikipedia volunteers worked on articles about central Asian archaeology, creating or improving around fifty articles.


The dream of a wiki-based, collaboratively edited repository of structured data that could be reused in Wikipedia infoboxes goes back to at least 2004, when Wikimedian Erik Möller ([http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Eloquence now the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation]) posted a [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Archive/Wikidata/historical detailed proposal] for such a project. The following years saw work on related efforts like the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki Semantic MediaWiki extension], and discussions of how to implement a central data repository for Wikimedia intensified in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-08-09/Technology_report#A_centralised_.22data_wiki.22 2010] and [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_summit_2011 2011].
At the Library, one of the most visible outcomes has been the “[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picturing_Canada#Picturing_Canada Picturing Canada]” project, digitising around 4,000 photographs from the Canadian Copyright Collection, with funding from Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. We’ve released around 2,000 images so far, as JPEGs and as high-resolution TIFFs, with the full collection likely to be available by early June (we’ve just found enough left in the budget to do an extra batch of postcards). Other content releases have included [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_from_the_British_Library digitised books], [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photograph_of_Jinnah_with_Gandhi_in_1944_%28Photo_429-17%29.jpg historic photographs], [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northern_Ireland_Revenue_Dog_Licence_1865-1928_2_shillings_steel_die_for_letterpress.JPG collection objects], and [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_in_a_submarine_-_British_Library_Royal_MS_15_E_vi_f20v_%28detail%29.jpg ancient manuscripts] (pictured).


The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since [https://www.wikidata.org/ Wikidata.org] went live on 30 October 2012, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links that previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions.
We also hosted the [[GLAM-WIKI 2013|GLAM-Wiki conference]] in April, which was a great success, with over 150 attendees and speakers from around the world. Several of the presentations are [http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL66MRMNlLyR5-g_SZll_leqpaHDCulraD now online].


Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself, and Wikipedians on many language Wikipedias have already started to add it to articles, or discuss how to make best use of it. Continues...
While I’m leaving the Library, some of these projects I’ve been working on will be continuing – we still have another 2,000 of the Canadian photographs to be released, for example! We’re also hoping to host some more workshops here in the future (possibly as part of the upcoming [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2013/04/wikimedia.aspx JISC program]). I’ll still be contactable, and I’m happy to help with any future projects you might have in mind; please do [[wikipedia:Special:EmailUser/Andrew_Gray|get in touch]] if there’s something I can help you with.
<span class="plainlinks">[http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/04/the-wikidata-revolution-is-here-enabling-structured-data-on-wikipedia/ <nowiki>[</nowiki>...<nowiki>]</nowiki>]</span>
<span class="plainlinks">[http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/05/wikipedian-in-residence-conclusions/ <nowiki>[</nowiki>...<nowiki>]</nowiki>]</span>


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Revision as of 14:58, 2 May 2013

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