Wikidata

Wikidata is the fastest growing project within the movement, with more than 37 million items, and a community of more than 1,400 very active editors. Edits on Wikidata account for roughly one in three edits across all Wikimedia projects.

Contributing to Wikipedia is a powerful experience—when you edit an article, the information is immediately available to anyone in the world. But imagine transcending the limits of language, where adding a fact or concept makes it instantly accessible to all of the hundreds of different language editions of Wikipedia, to any project within the Wikimedia universe, or to any entity on the Internet.

This is the promise of Wikidata, which has evolved from an experimental semantic web database to to an engine for capturing relationships among numerical, text, visual and graphical content. Interestingly, as it gains more traction within the Wikimedia community, Wikidata’s impact is perhaps even more significant outside of the Wikimedia universe—national libraries and world class museums working with “linked open data” have turned to Wikidata as a crucial public-facing interlinking hub.

Perhaps the most visible use of Wikidata in Wikipedia today is through automated information boxes that access statements from Wikidata to directly create rich infoboxes.