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Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase

Paper · 2014 · Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch

Summary

Wikipedia has accumulated a large number of structured facts: numbers, dates, coordinates, and relations between entities. However, they are scattered across roughly 30 million articles in 287 language editions. Extracting them automatically is difficult, and values often differ from one article to another. The authors describe Wikidata, a Wikimedia project launched in October 2012. It became a single multilingual data repository for all Wikipedias and for third-party applications. The project rests on several principles. Both the data and its schema can be edited. Conflicting statements may be stored side by side. Facts are accompanied by references to primary sources. There is one site for all languages, and labels are translated separately. The data model is built on property–value pairs, where each property has a defined type. More complex statements can include additional context, such as a date, and a source. The first stage was the migration of interlanguage links, which immediately produced millions of items. In less than two years, Wikidata became one of the most active Wikimedia projects. The data are available in JSON and RDF formats under terms that restrict reuse as little as possible. This makes the resource useful both for research and for developing new services.

Key points

  • Launch stages: in January 2013, the Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias were the first to connect to Wikidata. English joined in February, and all editions were connected in March. At the same time, the Lua language was introduced, and scripts written in it can read data from Wikidata.
  • The essence of the problem is illustrated with the example of Rome. Each of the 207 articles about the city contained a list of 206 links to other language versions, 42,642 lines in total. In 66 of the 287 editions, there was more interlanguage-link text than actual article content. Bots migrated more than 240 million such links from Wikipedia.
  • Statistics as of August 2014: about 15.8 million items and 43.2 million statements, of which 23.2 million have a source. Also 52.8 million labels, 54,670 registered contributors, and more than 157 million edits. The most frequently used property is "instance of".
  • There are only a few data types: a link to another item, string, quantity, date and time, geographic coordinates, URL, and media files. Labels, aliases and descriptions can be specified for 358 languages.
  • The authors compare Wikidata with other projects. Semantic MediaWiki stores data within the page text, and OpenCyc cannot be edited by the public. Freebase ties data to rigid types and runs on proprietary software. DBpedia and Yago merely extract data from Wikipedia and do not store information about sources.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Knowledge graphs & ontologies · 192 works

💡 Concepts 2Key ideas and methods explained on our concept pages.Natural language processing · 131 worksKnowledge graph · 49 works

Cite

Cite as Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch. 2014. Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase. Communications of the ACM 57(10).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{vrandecic2014wikidata,
  title = {{Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase}},
  author = {Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch},
  booktitle = {Communications of the ACM 57(10)},
  year = {2014},
  url = {https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/Article4002/en}
}

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