Wikimedia Deutschland

Wikidata, now a decade old, is the largest public knowledge graph, with data on more than 100 million concepts contributed by over 560,000 editors. It is widely used in applications and research. At its launch in late 2012, however, it was little more than a hopeful new Wikimedia project, with no content, almost no community, and a severely restricted platform. Seven years earlier still, in 2005, it was merely a rough idea of a few PhD students, a conceptual nucleus that had yet to pick up many important infuences from others to turn into what is now called Wikidata. In this paper, we try to recount this remarkable journey, and we review what has been accomplished, what has been given up on, and what is yet left to do for the future.

<p>With the Open Science Fellows Program, Wikimedia Deutschland teamed up with a number of different partners to support researchers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland over a period of five years to open up their own research work, thereby contributing to Free Knowledge. By offering qualifications, mentoring, funding and networking with others who are actively involved in disseminating Free Knowledge, a total of 90 fellows were trained as Free Knowledge practitioners and ambassadors. By participating in the program, the fellows were able to substantially broaden their knowledge about the theory and practice of Open Science, raise awareness for the subject within their academic community and pass on their knowledge. Many initiatives promoting Free Knowledge in academia have emerged from the community of practice that has evolved from the program and around it and a number of changes in favour of Open Science at an institutional level have been achieved.</p>

<strong>Mit dem Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen unterstützte Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. – gemeinsam mit verschiedenen Partner*innen – Wissenschaftler*innen aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz über fünf Jahre dabei, ihre eigene Forschungsarbeit zu öffnen und damit zu Freiem Wissen beizutragen. Durch Qualifizierungsangebote, Mentoring, finanzielle Unterstützung und Vernetzung mit anderen Aktiven im Bereich Offene Wissenschaft konnten insgesamt 90 Fellows zu Praktiker*innen und Botschafter*innen für Freies Wissen ausgebildet werden. Die Fellows konnten durch die Teilnahme am Programm ihre Kenntnisse über Theorie und Praxis Offener Wissenschaft maßgeblich erweitern, ihr wissenschaftliches Umfeld dahingehend sensibilisieren und ihr Wissen weitergeben. Aus der Praxis-Community, die sich aus und um das Programm herum gebildet hat, gingen zahlreiche Initiativen zur Förderung Freien Wissens in der Wissenschaft hervor und es konnten einzelne Veränderungen zu Gunsten von Offener Wissenschaft auf institutioneller Ebene erreicht werden. </strong>

What special considerations do practitioners need in order to host equitable, hospitable, synchronous hybrid video conversations, where some participants are together in a room while others join remotely? Presented are intentionally equitable hospitality practices of onsite and virtual facilitators (buddies) that have emerged from experiences in Virtually Connecting, a grassroots movement that holds conversations at education conferences that include remote participants who cannot attend due to financial, social, logistical, health, or other reasons.

Collaborative knowledge bases that make their data freely available in a machine-readable form are central for the data strategy of many projects and organizations. The two major collaborative knowledge bases are Wikimedia's Wikidata and Google's Freebase. Due to the success of Wikidata, Google decided in 2014 to offer the content of Freebase to the Wikidata community. In this paper, we report on the ongoing transfer efforts and data mapping challenges, and provide an analysis of the effort so far. We describe the Primary Sources Tool, which aims to facilitate this and future data migrations. Throughout the migration, we have gained deep insights into both Wikidata and Freebase, and share and discuss detailed statistics on both knowledge bases.

There are many ways to model relationships between texts and objects. Creating statements with RDF triples is one of them. In the project ‘Semantic Blumenbach', we have endeavoured to discover and render visible the innate connections of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's (1752–1840) writings on natural history with the physical objects studied and collected by him. After a careful evaluation of existing frameworks for describing objects and texts, we decided to test the Scientific Communication Infrastructure (WissKI) for this purpose. During the project, new modules have been developed, and a workflow to connect extracted knowledge from Blumenbach’s texts with metadata of objects has been established. The data modelling, the ingest workflow, and project evaluation in the context of the on-going discussion about Linking TEI and CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model are subjects of this article.

Over the last two years we have been developing Wikidata and build up a community around it. Wikidata is Wikimedia's central repository for structured data. This is the place where data, like the number of inhabitants of a country, is stored and made accessible to humans and computers alike. The data is used across all 287 language editions of Wikipedia and its sister projects as well as in projects outside of Wikimedia. In this talk we will take a look at how we developed Wikidata, what great tools are being built on top of it and what is in store for the future.