uploading. The OpenRefine tool is being generalized for use on other Wikibase installations.
Wikidata and Wikibase Lower Barriers to LOD, Help Scale Its Applications
Some past attempts to do linked data at scale and across domains have run into practical limitations. DBpedia,52 a linked data set based on Wikipedia (and recently including some Wikidata data) and created by a small group of academics has been published inconsistently, and requires parsing information from individual Wikipedias. Freebase, a Google-supported effort to create linked data, failed due to lack of a crowdsourcing community and investment. On the other hand, closed data sets like the Getty Vocabularies and Library of Congress Name Authorities are editorially created authority systems focusing on items held in museum or library collections, which means they represent a small fraction of the world’s culture and introduce layers of complexity to contribution. These limitations have largely precluded smaller institutions and independent contributors from participating, creating barriers for marginalized knowledge to enter the data set.
Wikidata and Wikibase directly address many of the challenges created by other linked data environments:
- it provides interfaces that allow for both strong human and bot-driven contribution;53
- it maintains a precise history of changes;
- the data model supports the addition of citation and/or attribution for each data point;
- the Wikidata community extends the work and knowledge created by the community of contributors that make Wikipedia and Wikimedia while also encouraging the inclusion of other open licensed data sets; and
