RENDER (KIT and Wikimedia Deutschland) were present at the Wikimania 2012 in Washington D.C. Wikimania is the annual international conference of the Wikimedia community. Wikimania allows the community and the general public to learn about and share their experiences with free knowledge initiatives all over the world.

We presented the RENDER toolkit and the planned Article Quality Monitor that will include the results from the diversity enabling tools of the toolkit. The intention was to get feedback from the people actually intended to benefit from these tools, the Wikipedia editors. Feedback was very positive and we got a lot of good input and ideas to improve the tools further.
We further hosted a discussion session around knowledge diversity which was very well received and presented RENDER in 1:1 presentation sessions at the Wikimedia Deutschlabd booth at the conference site.
Wikidata was also presented and received enourmous attention by the editors, who had a lot of questions and in most parts very positive feedback. It became obvious that Wikidata has an application potential in much more than the initially intended use cases and that the community eagerly waits to see it being put to work.

More information on the presentations is also available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RENDER.

Wikidata will be the first new Wikimedia project since 2006

Wikimedia Deutschland is starting the development of a new Wikimedia project, called Wikidata. Wikidata will provide a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge. Its first goal is to support the more than 280 language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles of the free encyclopedia.

For example, with Wikidata the birth date of a person of public interest can be used in all Wikipedias and only needs to be maintained in one place. Moreover, like all of Wikidata’s information, the birth date will also be freely usable outside of Wikipedia. The common-source principle behind Wikidata is expected to lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions. At the same time, Wikidata will decrease the maintenance effort for the tens of thousands of volunteers working on Wikipedia.

Read the full press release here: English | German