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WikidataCon 2017

Image by: Rama [CC BY-SA 3.0 fr]

Last weekend of October, was organized the most wanted event for Wikidata’s enthusiasts 🙂

Was such a pleasure to attend the first Wikidata Conference in Berlin.

Wikidata was created in 2012 with the primary purpose of gathering information from Wikipedia entries so that they can be shared between different language versions, but they also gather data from many different sources, can be edited by users as in Wikipedia, and anyone uses them to produce new information on other media. Wikidata  is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.

One of the greatest potentials for Wikidata is to make the underlying software more accessible, and to encourage more people to use it for their own research projects and large scale databases. Doing so would bring additional developers to the community to build tools that benefit academics, other researchers and free culture specialists to support this work.

The WikidataCon 2017 program was tight and intensive, and as expected very technical.

The presentations that I attended mainly took place at technical room since i offered to help with the moderation for that room, and unfortunately i couldn’t attend many other session specially related to Wikidata and education and GLAM but when you participate in an event with different sessions at the same time, you always miss something.

Oh, did I mention that was fifth birthday of Wikidata this year? And that this event happened to celebrate fifth years of hard work and success? Well, now you know.

The next WikidataCon will be in 2019. Next year every local community can host their own wikidata bday party 🙂

Happy birthday Wikidata <3