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

Check out the Wikipedia Map Interface developed by RENDER! The map is generated out of all geotagged articles in a dozen different language Wikipedias. The dynamic interface allows to zoom into the map and check out the individual articles. The different languages display a strong bias over the different languages.

Find the Wikipedia Map Interface here: http://km.aifb.kit.edu/sites/wikipediamap/

RENDER was mentioned in the news of two major German Web sites.

Heise online and taz.de reported about Wikimedia’s plan to build a centralized database that will be shared over all language versions of Wikipedia where the RENDER project is involved.

Read full article on heise online and taz.de

Fabian Flöck gave an interesting talk on the topic “Towards a diversity-minded Wikipedia” at the ACM 3rd International Conference on Web Science in Koblenz, Germany. You can find his talk on VideoLectures.net as well as in our presentations section. The corresponding paper can be downloaded here.

Wikipedia is introducing the WikiLove Button. It is already live on the Wikipedia test site and it will be available site-wide on Wednesday June 29th. It appears in the right hand corner of each user’s page, in the form of a little red heart. Users are encouraged to click the button when they come across edits or other on-site activity that deserves commendation.

A click of the button will result in the launch of a Love Interface, in which the user is presented a number of options for what kind of love to send and images to append to a free-text compliment area. The resulting declaration of support is published to the receiving user’s account discussion page and is monitored by top Wikipedia users to prevent misuse.