Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase

Wikidata allows every user to extend and edit the stored information, even without creating an account. A form based interface makes editing easy. Wikidata's goal is to allow data to be used both in Wikipedia and in external applications. Data is exported through Web services in several formats, including JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, and Resource Description Framework, or RDF. Data is published under legal terms that allow the widest possible reuse. The value of Wikipedia's data has long been obvious, with many efforts to use it. The Wikidata approach is to crowdsource data acquisition, allowing a global community to edit the data. This extends the traditional wiki approach of allowing users to edit a website. In March 2013, Wikimedia introduced Lua as a scripting language for automatically creating and enriching parts of articles. Lua scripts can access Wikidata, allowing Wikipedia editors to retrieve, process, and display data. Many other features were introduced in 2013, and development is planned to continue for the foreseeable future.