Wikidata: Attempting to bridge free, open-source software ideals and direct democracy

There’s more to the Wikimedia organization than the famous encyclopedia

Multiple other projects also use the vast linked data store that underpins ubiquitous internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and some of them are helping the fight for democracy.

Wikipedia is big, but even so, it’s bigger than it looks. For a start, the encyclopedia itself is larger than it appears: there are active Wikipedias in 342 different languages. More than 65 million articles and over 273 million pages, and they are all linked to each other within each language as well as between languages. The result is a vast linked knowledge graph, and it’s free, open source, and multilingual.

Wikidata is the part of the organization which manages this database. It underpins multiple other sites and projects than just the very visible encyclopedia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project uses it to power Aleph which helps about 25,000 investigative journalists track people and companies. WikiFlix, launched last month, is a free, no-registration-needed streaming service for non-copyrighted films. Cividata is an worldwide index of charities and non-profits. The GLAM mapping project indexes and maps Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.