Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Introducing the "concept cloud" for Wikidata

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On Wikidata, a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike, all the Wikipedia articles on the same subject are bundled in a Wikidata item. All these articles are written in different languages and they all refer to other Wikipedia articles through wiki links. These wiki links are known as Wikidata items as well. When you aggregate all these items, you get all the concepts that are related to the original subject and together make up a "concept cloud."

The beauty of a "concept cloud" is that, as all these subjects are related, they are likely to be more relevant when the subject of a "concept cloud" is what is in the news. It is assumed that what is considered "World News" will be of relevance to all the languages Wikidata supports. It is therefore likely that all the items in a "concept cloud" are more sought after in all these languages.

When you search for information, Wikidata provides more labels than Wikipedia provides articles. Even more powerful is the fact that, for Wikidata, every language is equal. For any language, Wikidata provides the same statements, the same links to Commons and the same visualization in the "Reasonator".

Wikidata works best when labels exist for the concepts, the properties and the qualifiers that are used. As more labels for related concepts are available, the information becomes more complete. For best results, our challenge is to stimulate people to add more labels.

The new "Concept Cloud" tool presents you with the "concept cloud" for Wikidata items. You can select a language you know and find if there is a label, and for existing labels you can check if they are properly written. They should not be capitalized unless they are always capitalized and spelling has to be the standard spelling.

Every day we are going to present another item that is in the news. Things will return in the news, but we are confident that there is always something that can be done. As this is the first iteration of the "Concept cloud" tool created by Magnus Manske, we do seek to get feedback. Do you like it? What can be improved?

Yes, there are other applications for a "concept cloud"... be creative and either implement them or let us hear about them.

Gerard Meijssen
Wikidata