have demonstrated substantial potential for changing the practice and the environment for practical implementation of linked open data in libraries.38 By consuming and contributing to Wikidata, libraries will also have a vested interest in its scalability and persistence.
A Brief History and Introduction to Wikidata
Wikidata is a knowledge base of structured linked data. Like the Wikimedia Foundation’s other projects, Wikidata is a wiki, and is editable both by individuals and by machines (using automatic programs that can make a series of specified changes, commonly known as “robots” or “bots”). Wikidata is published under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0, which means that the data contained in it is free to copy, modify, and distribute. It is a multilingual project, supporting labeling of items in hundreds of languages, all stored in a single site.
Wikidata was developed to connect and serve other Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia (which has 292 active language editions),39 Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia’s media repository, which as of February 2019 includes over 52 million freely licensed photos, videos, and other multimedia files),40 Wikisource (a collection of primary source and historical documents),41 and more. For instance, a single Wikidata item can provide links to Wikipedia articles about that item in various language editions of Wikipedia, connect to photos in Wikimedia Commons about the same topic, link to a definition on Wiktionary, and, if it is an item about a historical text, link to the full text on Wikisource. These inter-wiki links are dynamically updated: if a new Wikipedia article is written in a new language, the link will be added to Wikidata and it will be available from all other Wikipedia editions.
