Hi everyone,

Wikidata's 10th anniversary is coming in the following days and the social media accounts start to talk about it, mostly from institutional/official Wikimedia profiles. That's really good! As one of the responsibles of the microblogging handles of the Catalan Wikimedia projects, we are also thinking on a good coverage on Twitter for next weekend, to publicly explain its advantages, successes and uses to free knowledge.

I'd like to remind that we are a multilingual movement and that both Wikidata and also networks like Twitter are really active in other languages than English. For this reason, being #Wikidata10 the most neutral and easy hashtag, I do not really get why #WikidataBirthday was the final choice to communicate this milestone. This obviously masks outreach efforts from other languages without being contingent upon English-speaking contexts.

Similar cases have happened in the past. For example, #Wikipedia20 was huge on Twitter in January 2021 by @Wikipedia and @Wikimedia, but then the WMF comms team utterly ommited to consider the rest of birthdays of the first group of non-English versions along the year (luckily the good press did its work and covered well many of those languages when their 20 years arrived). Please, remember that it may seem a small detail, but these things -a simple hashtag without anglocentric vision- also make a difference on language perspective (especially after such a time, money and human-consuming Strategy 2030 that boasts about equity and diversity).

We'll certainly use #Wikidata10 and we encourage other languages to do the same.

Thank you for giving it a thought. Best,

Xavier Dengra