Wikidata:Eighth Birthday/Presents

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Wikidata's distributed birthday | October 2020 | #WikidataBirthday

Calendar

24-hours online meetup

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Presents & messages


On this page, you can add a birthday present to the list, or leave a birthday messages. Presents can be anything celebrating Wikidata and the work of its editors, especially something that can be useful to the community: a script you just wrote, improvements to a tool, something visual, a poem...

Presents[edit]

Need inspiration? Check out the presents from last year.

Congratulations[edit]

  • It is late October and once again the time of the year when we celebrate Wikidata's anniversary. Happy birthday, Wikidata! J 1982 (talk) 18:19, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • My best wishes to Wikidata to its 8th birthday, too. For me, the most impressive goal you reached within the last years is that Wikidata became a really independent project -- no longer only an add-on to Wikipedia handling interwiki links. And I have a wish, too: Wikidata should be become faster to save computing time. We (Wikivoyage and Commons) need it -- really. In July of this year, Mike Peel stated: "I think de-voy is an extreme example of Wikidata use." If you need an event to do this: Wikivoyage will celebrate its 15th birthday on December 10, 2021. In future, we will continue working on Wikidata use and support because it makes Wikivoyage better and would be helpful for smaller or new Wikivoyage communities. --RolandUnger (talk) 15:07, 29 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Happy Birthday Wikidata...Cheers to more years of greatness Udoka Ugo (talk) 16:08, 29 October 2020 (UTC)Udokaku Ugochukwu[reply]
  • Happy 8th birthday Wikidata! 🎂 --Wolverène (talk) 05:27, 30 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Many happy returns, Wikidata! Klaas `Z4␟` V:  10:08, 20 November 2020 (UTC) better late than never[reply]

Message from the development team[edit]

Today is Wikidata's 8th birthday. This is a time for celebration and reflection as well as a look towards the future.

Looking back, this past year hasn’t been normal and it has been challenging for many of us. I'm incredibly grateful for everyone who was a part of Wikidata so far and anyone who will be part of our work towards giving more people more access to more knowledge in the future. And I hope that you also found some solace in turning to Wikidata as a place for positive change, distraction and friendship.

Over the past year, Wikidata crossed some incredible milestones that we have every reason to be proud of. We have had over 12,500 active editors for the first time. <3 In terms of content we've reached 90 Million Items, 8000 Properties (many of them links to other collections, databases, websites, etc.), 310.000 Lexemes and 250 Entity Schemas. An Item now on average has 12.7 Statements and Labels in 5 languages. We've reached many milestones but I want to call out 3 big things specifically: We crossed Q-ID 100 Million, Commons now has over 3 Million infoboxes powered by Wikidata and 58.56% of articles across Wikimedia projects make use of data from Wikidata.

Moving away from the numbers - there was a lot of really cool stuff going on over the past year. Here is a small selection:

  • While we missed out on a lot of in-person events it was lovely to see so many communities around the world (France, Brasil, Australia, Portugal, Sweden, India, Canada, Ghana, Italy, ... just to name a few) step up with online-events or individual editors just jumping on the streaming bandwagon and streaming some Wikidata editing. It makes the world feel a bit closer even while we're apart.
  • We got a new sister with the approval of the Abstract Wikipedia project. Welcome, little sis!
  • The first (still rudimentary) version of the Wikidata Bridge is available on the first Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia. Thank you for being trailblazers on the way towards making it easier for every Wikimedia editor to edit Wikidata directly from their project.
  • We've made good progress on data quality improvements (even though there is more work ahead of us). We've made it easier to spot when changing the value of a statement without also changing its reference and found over 500,000 potential new references for unreferenced statements by scraping the web. On top of that, we improved the automated quality scoring by ORES to better judge the quality of Wikidata's Items at scale and understand how it changes over time.
  • The Wikibase Ecosystem has started to flourish with Sam joining the team and especially libraries coming together to embrace Wikibase. IFLA produced great videos about Wikidata and Wikibase if you want to get an impression. The early efforts of partners like FactGrid and the German National Library are starting to pay off. Thank you for being along for the ride!
  • On the more silly side: Tom Scott finally figured out what's the best thing with the help of Wikidata. I approve of the result.
  • Overall I don't think I can say it better than the UK Parliament data team: "Our admiration for Wikidata and for the people who work with it knows no bounds. Having a single source of well modeled, massively interlinked, well-managed data that anyone can query at the press of a button is a real thing of wonder."

A project as big as Wikidata of course also has its struggles that we need to address. For me, these continue to be in the area of data quality as well as our growth. Our technical and social infrastructure continues to be stretched and we are working to address these challenges but these are not easy solutions so they take time and effort.

For the coming year, I am looking forward to:

  • seeing many of you again in-person
  • continuing to help us all improve the quality, reliability and reach of Wikidata
  • seeing the Wikibase Ecosystem grow and integrate more with Wikidata
  • finding out what changes Abstract Wikipedia will bring

Happy Birthday, Wikidata! Here's to many more years to come. Stay awesome, welcoming, curious and a knower of all the things.

<3 Lydia, for the development team

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