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_2025-2028 .
Thank you for your efforts to drive Wikidata forward.
Best regards,
The Wikidata Team
Wikimedia Deutschland