Hi everyone :)

More than 7 years ago we started the development of Wikidata. We started out with the main goal of building a central data store for Wikipedia. Very quickly we expanded to also covering the other Wikimedia projects. Then came the interest from people outside Wikimedia to use Wikidata’s data to build their own apps, websites, visualisations and more. And last year we witnessed a significant interest in Wikibase, the software behind Wikidata. This means our work has expanded very significantly from what we started out with. We noticed that more and more people need clarity and certainty about where Wikidata and Wikibase are going. Because of this WMDE and WMF started discussing this more deeply and wrote down a lot of the things we have been talking about in the Wikidata and Wikibase communities over the last years.

The result of these conversations include one product vision paper and three product strategy papers that we are publishing today: * Vision: This paper gives a high-level overview of where we’d like to see Wikidata and Wikibase evolve and grow, based on the work of the past 7 years and many conversations with community members, movement partners, and other stakeholders. * Wikidata for Wikimedia projects: This paper dives deeper into how we see Wikidata developing in the context of the Wikimedia projects and how it can better support the projects. * Wikidata as a platform: This paper explores the value of Wikidata as a source of data for others outside Wikimedia to build upon. * Wikibase Ecosystem: This paper goes deeper into the idea of the Wikibase Ecosystem, a network of Wikibase instances which share data and other capacities.

I would love for you to read these papers now and give your feedback. We are collecting feedback until the end of October and will then integrate it as appropriate into a second iteration of the papers.

The papers are published at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Strategy/2019. Please leave your feedback and questions on the associated talk page.

I am looking forward to reading your input.

Cheers Lydia