Wikidata:Fifth Birthday/Lydia

Today Wikidata is turning 5 years old. The past year has been a year of growth and expansion. We are giving more people more access to more knowledge every single day while getting to geek out on structured data ;-)

Let’s take a look at some of our achievements of the past year:

• At this point about ⅓ of all edits in Wikimedia are happening on Wikidata. And even more importantly, the number of non-bot edits in Wikimedia projects is finally growing again - and almost all of it is happening on Wikidata.
• OpenStreetMap/MapBox, MySociety, YLE, eurowings, Quora, Siri, Alexa, Repurpos.us, lib.reviews, guessr, Stadt, Land, Wikidata, Scholia, Monumental, yes even Buzzfeed, and many more are using our data to build products and provide access to information for billions of people.
• Wikimedia projects make more and more use of our data to improve Wikimedia and its sister projects. The usage in Wikimedia projects grew by 60% over the last year alone.
• We have stepped up our game around documentation and outreach to make Wikidata accessible to more people.
• We have WikidataCon, our first own conference!

My highlights of the past year from the development side are:

• Improvements to tools that help us keep our data in good shape like constraint checks and improved identification of vandalism with ORES.
• Better support for Wikipedia and its sister projects, through for example, making it easier to see Wikidata’s influence on articles.
• Our demos for Structured Data on Commons and support for lexicographical data in Wikidata.

The next year promises to be an exciting one. I am especially thrilled by: We are going to add lexicographical data, opening new doors and promising exciting new opportunities. We are going to continue to improve our data quality tools like constraints checks. And we are going to work on building out our ecosystem by getting more people to run their own Wikibase installation to publish data they care about. But we also have to tackle a few challenges. As Wikidata is growing we have to adjust. We have to adjust processes, documentation and sometimes our thinking. That, I think, is our main challenge for the year ahead. We have more data, more editors and more users of our data than ever before. This brings with it increased expectations and responsibility. The users of our data, especially the large Wikipedias, have very high expectations toward Wikidata and I hope that with their help we can get closer to fulfilling them. And as we amass more data we also need to ask ourselves how we are going to maintain and work with it in the long run. The processes we set up when Wikidata was just beginning are not necessarily the best ones anymore.

With this I’d like to say Thank You for an amazing year and please stay awesome, open, lovely, enthusiastic and positive. We’re doing no less than changing the world together - every single day, with every single edit. Let’s celebrate!

<3 Lydia for the development team