Celebrating 10th Birthday of Wikidata
Wikidata went officially online on the 29th of October 2012. So today is Wikidata’s birthday!
Happy birthday Wikidata![edit | edit source]
File:HappyBirthdayWikidata.60137c0d.mp4
Wikidata has grown to an incredible #KnowledgeGraph over the last 10 years. It is not only a place that brings together thousands of active editors to provide knowledge around the world, but is also key for many industries that reuse and connect this data.
You may ask, is this data really used? Oh yes, and here are two anecdotes.
The product manager of Wikidata woke up one morning and read in the news “Siri is answering that the national anthem of South Africa as Despasito! How can that be?”. A quick check showed that the national anthem of South Africa according to Wikidata was despasito! Some measures were taken after this event to reduce such problems.
A Wikidata editor was on board on weekend and decided to insert into Wikidata information about YouTubers that speak about Philosophy (yes, many Wikidata Editors are Geeks ; )). In particular, he saw that his favourite Youtuber about this topic was missing. So he inserted the corresponding entry. To find the birthday he saw on Facebook that many people were congratulating him so he inserted the corresponding data and month. The week after the same YouTuber posts saying “Why is google saying I’m born in the year 0?”. When he read it he thought “Ups!”.
These are only two anecdotical examples that show that Wikidata’s data is highly used in Digital Assistant and Search.
Another example is “The Eu Knowledge” Graph that we maintain for the European Commission. Also there we reuse a lot of data about countries, institutions, beneficiaries, regions and more. Items in Wikidata are basically reused to model Knowledge of the European Commission, simply because Wikidata contains already so much World knowledge and there is no reason to reinvent it. There are similar examples across industries like museums, pharma, automotive and more …
Besides data Wikidata is also a driver for other things eg: methods for data ingestion like Open Refine, methods for data validation like Shex, methods for entity linking like OpenTapico, question answering like QAnswer, knowledge graph completion like WikidataComplete and so much more!
Wikidata gave us much in the last 10 years and we are looking forward to seeing how it will evolve next.
Again a big happy birthday and a big thank you to the developers, editors, consumers and people that make this possible every day![edit | edit source]
Best regards,The QA Company