Figure 5: Early mockup of the Wikidata UI
Figure 6: Screenshot of the Wikidata UI as of 2022
Among the important functionality added in the first months after launch were the support for wikis to use Wikidata’s sitelinks rather than encode that locally (first Wikipedias – Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian – in January 2013, and English in February 2013). Wikipedias started deleting the sitelinks from their local articles. This led to a removal of more than 240 million lines of wikitext across Wikipedia language editions, which reduced the cross-wiki maintenance effort massively [72]. In some languages, these lines constituted more than half of the content of that Wikipedia language edition. In many languages, editing activity dropped dramatically at first, sometimes by 80%. But those edits were mostly from bots that were previously needed to synchronize links across languages. With those bots gone, humans were suddenly better able to ‘see’ each other and build a more meaningful community. In many languages, this eventually led to an increased community activity. In addition to reducing the maintenance burden on the Wikipedias, this also lead to the creation of Items on Wikidata for a large number of general concepts represented by each of these articles, and thereby helped bootstrap the content of Wikidata.
Further development introduced properties and basic statements (January 2013), as well as basic support for including data from Wikidata into Wikipedia articles (April 2013). The editor community started rallying around the tasks that could be done with the limited functionality and started forming task forces (later becoming WikiProjects) to collect and expand data around topics such as countries and Pokémon, or to improve the language coverage forcertain languages.[1] This initial editor community was a healthy mix of people who were doing similar work on Wikipedia and found Wikidata to be a better fit for their type of work, some open data enthusiasts, and Semantic Web people who were excited by the idea of Wikimedia embracing (some of) their ideas and by what this would enable going forward.
Figure 7: Number of pages on Wikidata: Wikidata reached 100 million entities just in the week before its tenth birthday
Figure 8: Monthly active contributors on Wikidata; the circle indicates when the initial import of sitelinks finished
Along the way, the skepticism of some (though not all) Wikimedians could be addressed by Wikidata showing its benefits and potential, and by the care that had been put into its foundational design. The centralization of sitelinks brought a lot of goodwill to Wikidata.[2] It helped that early on it was decided that Wikidata would not be forced upon any Wikimedia project, but that instead it would be up to the editor community on each wiki to decide where and how they would make use of data from Wikidata.
It has been a challenge to make the idea of a knowledge graph accessible and attractive to an audience that is not familiar with the ideas of the Semantic Web. Data is abstract, and it takes creativity and effort to see the potential in linking this data and making it machine-readable. A few key applications were instrumental in sparking excitement by showing what is and will become possible once Wikidata grew. Chief among the people who made this possible was Magnus Manske, who developed Reasonator,[3] an alternative view on Wikidata; Wiri,[4] an early question answering demo; and Wikidata Query, the first query tool for Wikidata.
- ↑ In January 2013 the labels and descriptions task force succeeded in creating English labels for all of the first 20,000 Items.
- ↑ Former Board of Trustee member Phoebe Ayers stated that “the sitelinks alone were worth the price of admission”.
- ↑ https://reasonator.toolforge.org
- ↑ https://magnus-toolserver.toolforge.org/thetalkpage
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