CITATION — REFERENCE ENTRY
Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase — Communications of the ACM
- Key
- vrandecic2014wikidata
- Authors
- Vrandečić, Denny; Krötzsch, Markus
- Issued
- 2014-10
- Type
- article-journal
- Container
- Communications of the ACM
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 78-85
- DOI
- 10.1145/2629489
Raw CSL JSON
{
"DOI": "10.1145/2629489",
"URL": "https://cacm.acm.org/research/wikidata/",
"ISSN": "0001-0782",
"note": "Peer-reviewed overview of Wikidata by two of its originators; full text freely readable. Article text published under CC BY 3.0.",
"page": "78-85",
"type": "article-journal",
"issue": "10",
"title": "Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase",
"author": [
{
"given": "Denny",
"family": "Vrandečić"
},
{
"given": "Markus",
"family": "Krötzsch"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
2014,
10
]
]
},
"volume": "57",
"accessed": {
"date-parts": [
[
2026,
8,
26
]
]
},
"language": "en",
"publisher": "Association for Computing Machinery",
"container-title": "Communications of the ACM"
}
Claims
-
Vrandečić and Krötzsch describe seven design decisions characterising Wikidata: open editing by any user; community control over both the data and its schema; plurality, allowing conflicting data to coexist rather than assuming global agreement on the true value; secondary data, recording facts as published by identified primary sources rather than as absolute truths; multilingual data, with a single site rather than per-language editions; easy access through exports in formats including JSON and RDF under terms permitting the widest possible reuse; and continuous incremental evolution.
"Plurality. It would be naive to expect global agreement on the "true" data, since many facts are disputed or simply uncertain. Wikidata allows conflicting data to coexist and provides mechanisms to organize this plurality. Secondary data. Wikidata gathers facts published in primary sources, together with references to these sources; for example, there is no "true population of Rome" but rather a "population of Rome as published by the city of Rome in 2011.""
-
Wikidata launched in October 2012 with limited features, editors initially being able only to create items and connect them to Wikipedia articles. In January 2013 the Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias began connecting to it, the English Wikipedia followed in February, and all Wikipedias were connected in March. By February 2014 more than 40,000 contributors had taken part. The authors record that the development team's work on Wikidata was funded through donations from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Yandex.
"Wikimedia launched Wikidata in October 2012. Initially, features were limited, with editors only able to create items and connect them to Wikipedia articles. In January 2013, three Wikipedias—first Hungarian, then Hebrew and Italian—began to connect to Wikidata. [...] The development team's work on Wikidata is funded through donations by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Google, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Yandex."
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