A systematic literature review on Wikidata

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the current status of research on Wikidata and, in particular, of articles that either describe applications of Wikidata or provide empirical evidence, in order to uncover the topics of interest, the fields that are benefiting from its applications and which researchers and institutions are leading the work. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review is conducted to identify and review how Wikidata is being dealt with in academic research articles and the applications that are proposed. A rigorous and systematic process is implemented, aiming not only to summarize existing studies and research on the topic, but also to include an element of analytical criticism and a perspective on gaps and future research. Findings Despite Wikidata’s potential and the notable rise in research activity, the field is still in the early stages of study. Most research is published in conferences, highlighting such immaturity, and provides little empirical evidence of real use cases. Only a few disciplines currently benefit from Wikidata’s applications and do so with a significant gap between research and practice. Studies are dominated by European researchers, mirroring Wikidata’s content distribution and limiting its Worldwide applications. Originality/value The results collect and summarize existing Wikidata research articles published in the major international journals and conferences, delivering a meticulous summary of all the available empirical research on the topic which is representative of the state of the art at this time, complemented by a discussion of identified gaps and future work.

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“…• Wikidata as controlled vocabulary: Wikidata, a collaboratively edited knowledge base of structured linked data [2,[33][34][35], has recently received attention as a resource for semantic enrichment [33] and as a linked open data hub for library catalogues [34,35]. Wikidata items (similar to terms in controlled vocabularies) and properties (i.e.…”

Entity Linking as a Population Mechanism for Skill Ontologies: Evaluating the Use of ESCO and Wikidata

“…Entity linking was carried out by disambiguation of entities in the large Wikibase knowledge graph [ 4 ].…”

Wikidata as a FAIR knowledge graph for the life sciences

“…The authors thank the thousands of Wikidata contributors for curating knowledge, both directly related 8 and unrelated to this work. The authors also thank the Wikimedia Foundation developers and 9…”

“…representing knowledge in a structured format instead of primarily free text. As of September 2019, 8 Wikidata's knowledge graph included over 750 million statements on 61 million items [7]. Wikidata also 9 became the first Wikimedia project that surpassed one billion edits, achieved by its community of 20 10 thousand active users and 80 active computational 'bots'.…”

“…Wikidata also 9 became the first Wikimedia project that surpassed one billion edits, achieved by its community of 20 10 thousand active users and 80 active computational 'bots'. Since its inception in 2012, Wikidata has a 11 proven track record for leveraging the crowdsourced efforts of engaged users in building a massive 12 knowledge graph [8]. Wikidata is run by the Wikimedia Foundation (https://wikimediafoundation.org), an 13 organization that has a long track record of developing and maintaining web applications at scale.…”