froscon2012: FrOSCon Program

It is nearly impossible to go online today without stumbling upon Wikipedia at some point along the way. Wikipedia, however, is just one of several projects in the Wikimedia movement next to Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary and more. In April a team of 12 started working on the foundations of a new Wikimedia project for 1 year. The project is called Wikidata. The goal is to provide Wikipedia and the world with a large free and open data repository. Wikidata will bring structured data to Wikipedia.

I’d like to give an introduction to Wikidata, its goals and what it means for the Wikimedia movement, Open Data and the world.

It is nearly impossible to go online today without stumbling upon Wikipedia at some point along the way. Wikipedia, however, is just one of several projects in the Wikimedia movement next to Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary and more. In April a team of 12 started working on the foundations of a new Wikimedia project for 1 year. The project is called Wikidata. The goal is to provide Wikipedia and the world with a large free and open data repository. Wikidata will bring structured data to Wikipedia and thereby help reduce a lot of the duplication between the different language editions. It is expected to especially help smaller Wikipedias who can then benefit from the work done by larger Wikipedias. Wikidata will contain things like the date of birth of a famous person, the height of an important building, the number of inhabitants of a country and much more.

But what makes Wikidata special beyond being done in the Wikimedia movement? It will be able to deal with the ambiguity of the world. It will contain different statements about the same thing citing different sources with different values (for example for the population size of Israel). It will contain not just statements but also its sources and additional information like validity and granularity. It aims to be a showcase and testing-ground of how to collect and maintain large amounts of data by a community. And it will bring Wikimedia closer to its vision of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

I’d like to give an introduction to Wikidata, its goals and what it means for the Wikimedia movement, Open Data and the world.