Dear Wikidata Community,
As part of Wikimedia Deutschland’s 2030 Strategic Direction and in close
collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the Wikidata team has
set its priorities for 2025 around 4 core themes: ensuring Wikidata can
continue to grow sustainably, strengthening the diverse community of
editors who steward and reuse our data, and refining the underlying
platform services that power everything we build together.
We chose these focuses because, first, as Wikidata’s size and impact
expand, it’s crucial that we build systems and policies that keep our
infrastructure healthy and our data dependable. Second, our community
remains at the heart of everything we do -- whether someone contributes the
first statement to a brand new Item or runs complex queries that power
research and apps. Finally, by refining data access methods “as a service”
across our ecosystem, we’ll open the door for all our product teams and
third-party developers to build meaningful services and applications that
create positive impact.
Supporting sustainable growth means two things this year.
We’ll partner with the Wikibase teams to improve federated SPARQL queries.
This would allow you pull data seamlessly from multiple Wikibase instances
lowering the barrier to hosting some data in other parts of the Wikibase
Ecosystem, ensuring everyone can continue to access and edit data reliably.
At the same time, we’ll have conversations about data governance guidelines
together with the Cloud and Suite teams and the wider Wikidata community.
This way it's always obvious where different kinds of data belong. That
clarity helps editors make confident decisions, reduces duplicate work, and
lays the foundation for new projects that can flourish alongside Wikidata
itself.
Strengthening the Wikidata community means making every step of
contribution easier and more rewarding.
Mobile editing has grown in recent years, yet adding or updating statements
on a phone still forces many users into “desktop view.” We’ll roll out a
prototype that will make editing statements on mobile phones easier. To
help more advanced editors and tool builders, we’ll continue growing the
visibility and documentation around EntitySchemas, so that editors
everywhere can adopt these powerful templates and can integrate them out of
the box. And of course, we’ll bring people together through online and
in-person events such as WikidataCon, regional capacity‑building campaigns
in Africa, meetups at Wikimania and other conferences, XXX Days events like
Data Reuse Days and Lexico Days, and more. By connecting newcomers with
experienced mentors, by highlighting local hubs where editors can support
each other, and by linking each Item back to its relevant WikiProjects,
we’ll nurture more active, diverse, and resilient communities.
Our third focus area is Increasing mission-aligned data reuse
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_For_Wikimedia_Projects> team will
improve the editing experience and increase productivity of Wikipedia
contributors by making it easier for editors to monitor, understand, and
act on changes to their watchlisted articles when the edit comes from
Wikidata. Displaying Wikidata edits in Watchlist and Recent Changes pages
is an opt-in feature of the user preferences; our aim is to increase
awareness, adoption, and utility of this function by summer 2026.
In parallel, we will raise awareness and contributors’ understanding of the
Wikidata integrations currently being used in the Wikimedia Projects
through a community outreach project by hosting an online conference, Wikidata
and Sister Projects
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event:Wikidata_and_Sister_Projects>,
dedicated to celebrating and informing Wikimedians of the many ways
Wikidata currently supports the Wikimedia Projects. Additionally, we are
reviewing the available documentation on Wikidata integrations to ensure it
is updated, comprehensive, and available in multiple core languages.
Refining platform services “as a service” is our fourth focus area.
We’ll refine data access methods so Wikidata's data can be reused to build
meaningful services and applications. Specifically, we'll build out search
capabilities in the REST API so developers can discover and query data more
easily. We’ll ensure the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is optimized for its
core strength of supporting queries that need the graph -- keeping it fast
and reliable under complex workloads. Finally, we’ll improve our data dumps
to provide more accessible snapshots and subsets of Wikidata’s data.
What does this mean for you?
If you’re a mobile‑first contributor, editing from your phone will become
smooth and straightforward. If you’re a developer or researcher, you’ll
gain powerful new search endpoints in the REST API, a finely tuned Wikidata
Query Service for graph-centric queries, and cleaner, more timely data
dumps to build on. If you organize or participate in events, you’ll find
more support and clearer pathways to grow local hubs and share best
practices. If you’re leveraging Wikidata’s data to support your workflows
and content in other Wikimedia projects, you’ll have access to current
use-cases, examples and better documentation to refer to. Ultimately, every
update we make in this period is designed to give you more confidence, more
choice, and more impact as you add, improve, and reuse the world’s free
structured knowledge.
We’ll keep you posted on progress throughout the year and as always,
welcome your questions and feedback on the talk page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Development_plan/Wikidata_2025-…>
.
Thank you for your efforts to drive Wikidata forward.
Best regards,
The Wikidata Team
Wikimedia Deutschland
--
*Danny Benjafield*
Community Communications Manager
Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30-577 11 62-0
https://wikimedia.de
Keep up to date! Current news and exciting stories about Wikimedia,
Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our newsletter (in German): Subscribe now.
<https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine
Hello, in the next coming months, these changes will happen in databases
and the infrastructure. And it might affect you if you rely on them in your
tools or queries. This list is ordered based on how soon the change will
happen.
We understand that updating your tools and systems can be time consuming,
hence we are giving an advanced notice. I truly apologize for the
inconvenience but many of these changes are needed to keep the site running
smoothly.
Image table redesign
Around fourteen years after the creation of T28741
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T28741>, we are implementing the changes
described therein. Currently, every current version of an image has a row
in the image table and if there are older versions of that file, those rows
could be found in the oldimage table. These two tables (image and oldimage)
will be dropped in around two months. The replacement will be two main
tables: file and filerevision. Every file will have a row in the file table
describing the name and the type. Every version of the file (current and
old) will have a row in filerevision describing the file-specific
information such as its size or the hash of the file, similar to the
existing distinction between pages and revisions. Another improvement is
that every file and file revision will get a unique auto increment id
simplifying many operations and queries. You can check T28741
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T28741> for more information. The new
tables are already accessible in wikireplicas but the data hasn’t been
fully migrated yet.
Term store split out of wikidata’s database
Wikidata’s database has been growing too fast and we need to move the term
store (tables starting with wbt_) to a dedicated cluster to allow growth
and improve wikidata’s performance by utilizing cache locality. The new
section will be called x3 and you will be able to access it in wikireplicas
but this also means you won’t be able to join these tables with the rest of
wikidata’s database (such as page table) since they will be residing in two
physically separate servers that also means most of your queries to
wikidata’s database (and term store) will become faster. We are aiming for
the switch to happen in three months’ time. You can follow the work in
T351820 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T351820>.
Additionally, wb_type table will be dropped and the mapping will be
hard-coded in the code instead. See gerrit:1110810
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase/+/1110810>
for more details. This helped us simplify a lot of Wikibase code (example
<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Wikibase/+/1110720>).
Categorylinks normalization
Categorylinks is the next table in the series of links tables being
normalized via the linktarget table (parent ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T300222>, RFC
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T222224>). Similar to templatelinks and
pagelinks tables, cl_to will be dropped and instead the new field
cl_target_id will point to lt_id in the linktarget table. We will also drop
the cl_collation field and replace it with cl_collation_id which will point
to the collation_id field on the new table we are introducing called
collation. We are aiming to get this fully done by the end of the next
quarter (end of June 2025) but it depends on how fast the migration script
can operate and that’s outside of our control. You can follow the work in
T299951 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T299951>.It’s worth noting that
after this migration is done, we will start working on the imagelinks table.
Thank you
--
*Amir Sarabadani (he/him)*
Staff Database Architect
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hello everyone,
This is a breaking change announcement relevant for Wikidata users working
with RDF output.
This update will affect the way EntitySchema values are represented in
Wikidata’s RDF output. To align with the naming conventions used for other
entity type references, we are updating the wikibase:propertyType value for
properties with data type EntitySchema from:
http://wikiba.se/ontology#EntitySchema
to
http://wikiba.se/ontology#WikibaseEntitySchema
The former URI may one day be reused as the rdf:type of EntitySchema
entities when they are exported to RDF. (Compare, for example, wd:Q42 a
wikibase:Item vs. wd:P31 wikibase:propertyType wikibase:WikibaseItem)
Additionally, the EntitySchema property type URI will now be defined in the
Wikibase ontology at http://wikiba.se/ontology. This change brings
consistency with other entity types (Items, Properties, Lexemes, etc.) and
will simplify query writing and RDF processing.
Rollout Timeline:
-
Test Wikidata: The updated configuration is now deployed on Test
Wikidata.
-
Full Rollout on Wikidata: The change will go live on Wikidata on 24
April 2025 following the two-week advance notice as required by our Stable
Interface Policy.
Impact:
-
Users who get the data type of properties via RDF, or who filter for
EntitySchema-type properties in SPARQL queries, will need to change the
value they look for.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please don’t
hesitate to reach out to us in this ticket (T371196
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T371196>).
Cheers,
--
Zita U. Zage
Intern, Wikidata Software Communication Team
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 577 116 2466
https://wikimedia.de
Grab a spot in my calendar for a chat: cal.com/zuz
<https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=eml0YS56YWdlQHdpa2ltZWRpYS5kZQ>.
A lot is happening around Wikidata - Keep up to date!
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates> Current news and
exciting stories about Wikimedia, Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our
newsletter (in German): Subscribe now <https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B.
Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorstände: Franziska Heine,
Dr. Christian Humborg