Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository, and so can you
Wikidata, a centralized structured data repository for facts and Wikimedia's first big new project in the last 7 years, is now feeding the foundation's main project, Wikipedia. — The Wikidata project …
Context & Ripple Effects
Wikimedia had spent 2012 confronting an awkward question: with its encyclopedia described as nearing completion 'in a sense,' what does a volunteer project of tens of thousands of editors — and hundreds of maintenance bots — do next? Wikidata, the foundation's first major new project in seven years, is the structural answer taking shape.
As of this week the repository is live in production, feeding confirmed facts directly into Wikipedia rather than sitting as a side experiment, and the pickup was broad for an infrastructure story: the Guardian and gHacks both carried it on or about April 27, 2013.
First-order effects
- Editors stop re-keying the same facts across every language edition: a change made once in the central repository propagates into Wikipedia articles, replacing per-wiki duplication with a single editable source.
- The repository is open to outside use from day one, so any developer or site can pull the same structured facts Wikipedia runs on, free of charge.
Second-order effects
- Wikipedia's existing bot ecosystem — already keeping the encyclopedia running at scale — gains a cleaner machine-readable substrate, shifting bot work from patching inconsistencies between editions to curating one canonical dataset.
- Commercial knowledge-base providers face an open, community-maintained alternative for basic factual lookup, pressuring licensing models built on selling structured reference data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Wikimedia's center of gravity shifts from prose written for human readers toward structured data consumable by software equally — making the foundation's corpus infrastructure for applications well beyond the encyclopedia itself.
- Multilingual consistency stops being a translation problem and becomes a data-modeling problem, changing what skills and governance a volunteer community needs to hold together.
The trend: Reference knowledge is migrating from human-readable articles toward shared structured repositories that serve editors, machines, and third-party developers from one source.