Bridging institutional heritage and citizen-driven knowledge commons
Ecosystem context
MediaWiki is an open source software based on a set of core principles for creating, editing and sharing information on the web. It is most well-known in its public form – the international online encyclopedia project, Wikipedia. Over the last few decades MediaWiki software has proliferated into an interconnected system of public applications – Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource – to complement Wikipedia. Self-hosted instances of the software are also widely used by institutions, organisations or communities for a variety of data management use cases. All MediaWiki software is multilingual and collaborative, designed for crowdsourcing information creation and editing. It implements version control natively, so that collaboration can be managed easily, allowing individual operations to be tracked and linked to their respective agent (human or software, e.g. bot).
Why connect?
The main MediaWiki software is designed for working with text, but over the years the sheer volume of information in Wikipedia required structuring and interconnection. For example, updating accurately the changing data on population of the city of Rome is much easier via a central structured database, than manually across all 269 multilingual articles for Rome contained in Wikipedia. The need to add data related to the text articles resulted in the development of several software extensions, notably Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase. Data management in the public platforms of the Wiki ecosystem is done primarily in Wikidata, the largest public instance of the Wikibase extension.
Wikidata provides extensive data coverage across a range of general and specialized topics, and serves as a global hub of interconnected authority file IDs (VIAF, GeoNames, National Library Authorities, and many more). The IDs, used to uniquely identify entities across different databases, can be accessed and reused via data reconciliation, enrichment and federation methods. This enables researchers and organisations to use Wikidata as a shortcut to map entities and concepts in external resources to local data, contributing to the creation of a robust and interconnected network of (linked open) data. Such a network holds the promise of delivering crowdsourced enriched data back to the original source.
Reimagining MediaWiki software
Relying on MediaWiki as base technology comes with a ready-made, well-established and widely-adopted user interface for collaborative curation of knowledge. Choosing MediaWiki allows ECHOLOT to benefit from an extensive library of ready-made and customisable modules, extensions and plug-ins, alongside a dedicated developer and maintainer community with a strong focus on open source and open knowledge values.
Building on the extensive expertise of our partners – some of them being active developers and maintainers of both the Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase extensions – ECHOLOT reimagines the decades-old software for contemporary use-cases. Not starting from scratch allows the team to focus on addressing current limitations, especially with respect to handling structured data following established cultural heritage schemas, managing user access rights with more nuance and respect to copyrights, and last but not least, building in capacity for agentic AI automation. All new developments remain open source and can be followed on GitHub.