Dear all,
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 structured data work has expanded very significantly from what we started out with. At the same time, over these past few years, both WMDE [1] and the WMF [2] have spent significant time and invested in supporting the movement strategy work and aligning our organizational plans with the movement strategy.
Given all this interest, and this moment of opportunity and positive change, we felt it was time to sit together and get clarity on the next steps for our structured data work. It is important that we know what we want to achieve in the next few years, what our long-term hopes are for Wikidata and Wikibase, how these align with organisational and movement strategy, and what support and resources are required for their success.
The result of these conversations include one product vision paper and three product strategy papers that we are publishing today:
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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.
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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.
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Wikidata as a platform: This paper explores the value of Wikidata as a source of data for others outside Wikimedia to build upon.
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Wikibase Ecosystem: This paper goes deeper into the idea of the Wikibase Ecosystem, a network of Wikibase instances which could share data and other capacities.
We are now inviting you to read the vision and strategy papers and give us your feedback. We are collecting this 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.
We are looking forward to reading your input.
Since this is my first mail to this list, a short introduction about myself: I joined Wikimedia Deutschland 2 years ago as the Head of Software & Development. I have been working with the Product, UX, Engineering and Community Communication people in my department to move this amazing project forward.
Regards
Franziska
Head of Software & Development, Wikimedia Deutschland
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/Planning_2019/enand https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/Zukunftsprozess/EN
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction