14 DAY TRIAL // Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, also manages several other less known but equally important sites and projects. The only new one since 2006, Wikidata promises to be a very important one.
As the name suggests, Wikidata aims to be a repository for data, structured and easily accessible, useful in all sorts of situations.
The repository has been up and running for a little over a year and it has already reached an important milestone, Wikipedia itself relies on it.
"By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia," Wikimedia explained.
"Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications," it added.
It makes a lot of sense for Wikipedia to rely on a global repository. The site features a lot of facts, data, dates, numbers and so on, which are shared between all language versions and across several articles.
A fresh set of numbers meant manual updates for all the pages that used them. Now, all it takes is one update and the figures are automatically updated on all the pages that use them.
"An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links that previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions. Wikidata's collection of these items now numbers over 10 million," Wikimedia added.
But Wikidata goes beyond this, a central repository of facts and data, a Wikipedia for data could be used by countless apps and websites.
While the API to access all this data is still under development, all the data is published under a Creative Commons C0 or Public Domain license, which should mean that anyone could do whatever they wanted with it.