Wikidata (www.wikidata.org, Wikipedia article) is a Wikimedia hosted and maintained project launched in 2012 that aims to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for media files.

It enables central management of interwiki links located in the sidebar, between projects' language versions and across projects covering given subjects, which was previously implemented through individual interwiki links at page bottoms.

The initial development of the project was funded with a generous donation by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [ai]2, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc.

Further information

  • Wikidata.org – this is the production website.
  • Wikidata test site
  • Introduction – offers a non-technical introduction to the goals of the Wikidata project proposal.
  • FAQ – answers some of the most frequently asked questions.
  • Development – offers an overview of the current development work.
  • Contribute – shows how you can help.
  • Glossary – is a list of terms used around Wikidata and their explanation.

Impact on Wikipedia

We are working on three major things:

  1. Centralizing language links
  2. Providing a central place for infobox data for all Wikipedias
  3. Creating and updating list articles based on data in Wikidata

Status

We are posting regular summaries of the activities around Wikidata on Status updates.

Size

Wikidata is currently the largest Wikimedia project, with over 110 million content pages.