Jan Ainali – Using content from Wikidata in your apps #FOSSBack

This talk introduces Wikidata as a semantic database that serves as a hub for information related to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It is maintained by a global community of roughly 12,000 active editors and is licensed under CC0, allowing for easy reuse. The speaker emphasizes the multilingual nature of Wikidata, which spans over 400 languages, and discusses the structured data format, including RDF triples, that enables powerful querying capabilities. With over 130 million items and 1.5 billion facts, Wikidata provides a vast resource for developers to access and integrate into applications. The speaker highlights various examples of how the data can be utilized, such as in visualizations or content augmentation, and encourages responsible use of the platform.

So, I'm not representing Wikidata. I'm just a volunteer, as I said. Uh but I want to thank Lydia Pintscher, who's the portfolio lead for Wikimedia Deutschland. 95% of the slides is hers. So, what is Wikidata? Super briefly. You can think about it as the semantic database for Wikipedia. And it's licensed CC0, so it's really easy for you to reuse. And it's built by community. And one of

the really strong points is that it's a hub for a lot of different other database and Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia uh content. And everything in like all the concepts in Wikidata is an item, which is an ID. And then it's multilingual. I think it's over 400 languages now with all the labels. So, it's reusable wherever you are. And then we have machine-readable facts or statements, as

we call them. Uh RDF triples. But we do them in a little bit of a more nuanced way, which allows for really powerful queries. And since the items connect to each other, you can also explore and make very interesting queries and find surprising things. And all of Wikipedia, every single article already have an item, so you can imagine the breadth of the topics. And then there's another

2/3 of things that you can uh find there. So, one over 130 million items. And we can express these using 13,000 different properties, so very detailed descriptions we can make. And together that makes about 1.5 billion facts like this. Uh here's uh one of them. And there's also words or lexemes as we call them, which you can use however you like. There are some like mobile keyboard

apps reusing this. And everything is maintained by currently around 12,000 active editors. So, what can you do? There's a lot of people already using this. And for example, you can just get basic facts into your app. Or you can augment the content you have using what's in Wikidata. Or you can sort of select a subset of the data that is in Wikidata and present it in another

visual way than Wikidata. Here we see Govdirectory, which tries to make visual all the contact points for all the public organizations in the world. Or the the OpenArtBrowser, which also gets the images from Wikimedia Commons that are public domain. Or you can sort of like make these hubs of hubs where connecting other databases in in a easily browsable way. And as I said, internationalization is one of

the really strong points. Mapbox is using this for giving you the local place names of the map like in the language. The Finnish Yle uses this for their topic tags. I have built some menus based on this for events so you can get everybody can read the the ingredients in their own language. So, how do you get the data? There's a lot of different ways to do

it. So, if you're technically inclined, you might recognize some of these things. Now, the latest one, there's also an MCP now if you're doing something with AI, I think. I haven't tried it out yet. Forgot to put it up here. But a lot of different ways. And there's a lot of different tips and tricks as well. But you should remember that Wikidata is a commons, so treat

it with respect and care, and don't abuse it. Uh try to give something back if you can. It is easy to use. You don't have to say where it comes from. It would be nice if you say "Powered by Wikidata." And introduce yourself. If you're doing some editing and being paid, you have to disclose it. But otherwise, it's just nice to be a way to be part

of the And fix errors if you can. You already all here have commit rights. You can just press the edit button and and fix There's a beautiful portal called Wikidata for developers with a lot of different information and a lot of other things where you can read deeper on specific topics. And they are Mastodon, so you can follow them there. And I am, too.