Show notes
Denny Vrandečić
As the founder of Wikidata, Denny Vrandečić has thought a lot about how to better connect the world's knowledge.
His current project is Abstract Wikipedia, an initiative that aims to let anyone anywhere on the planet contribute to, and benefit from, the world's collective knowledge, in their native language.
It's an ambitious goal, but - inspired by the success of other contributor-driven Wikimedia Foundation projects - Denny is confident that community can make it happen
We talked about:
his work as Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation and his current projects: Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia
the origin story of his first project at Wikimedia - Wikidata
a precursor project that informed Wikidata - Semantic MediaWiki
the resounding success of the Wikidata project, the most edited wiki in the world, with half a million contributors
how the need for more expressivity than Wikidata offers led to the idea for Abstract Wikipedia
an overview of the Abstract Wikipedia project
the abstract language-independent notation that underlies Abstract Wikipedia
how Abstract Wikipedia will permit almost instant updating of Wikipedia pages with the facts it provides
the capability of Abstract Wikipedia to permit both editing and use of knowledge in an author's native language
their exploration of using LLMs to use natural language to create structured representations of knowledge
how the design of Abstract Wikipedia encourages and facilitates contributions to the project
the Wikifunctions project, a necessary precondition to Abstract Wikipedia
the role of Wikidata as the Rosetta Stone of the web
some background on the Wikifunctions project
the community outreach work that Wikimedia Foundation does and the role of the community in the development of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions
the technical foundations for his
how to contribute to Wikimedia Foundation projects
his goal to remove language barriers to allow all people to work together in a shared knowledge space
a reminder that Tim Berners-Lee's original web browser included an editing function
Denny's bio
Denny Vrandečić is Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation, leading the development of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. He is the founder of Wikidata, co-creator of Semantic MediaWiki, and former elected member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. He worked for Google on the Google Knowledge Graph. He has a PhD in Semantic Web and Knowledge Representation from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
Connect with Denny online
user Denny at Wikimedia
Wikidata profile
Mastodon
LinkedIn
email: denny at wikimedia dot org
Resources mentioned in this interview
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikidata
Semantic MediaWiki
Wikidata: The Making Of
Wikifunctions
Abstract Wikipedia
Meta-Wiki
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/iB6luu0w_Jk
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 32. The original plan for the World Wide Web was that it would be a two-way street, with opportunities to both discover and share knowledge. That promise was lost early on - and then restored a few years later when Wikipedia added an "edit" button to the internet. Denny Vrandečić is working to make that edit function even more powerful with Abstract Wikipedia, an innovative platform that lets web citizens both create and consume the world's knowledge, in their own language.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 32 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Denny Vrandecic. Denny is best known as the founder of Wikidata, which we'll talk about more in just a minute. He's currently the Head of Special Projects at the Wikimedia Foundation. He's also a visiting professor at King's College London. So welcome, Denny. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Denny:
Thank you so much for having me, Larry. It's really a pleasure and honor. I enjoy listening to your podcast a lot, and I'm very happy to be here too. So these days I'm with the Wikimedia Foundation and, as I said, called Head of Special Projects. There are working on two new projects, one called Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, which are really very much tied together, and we'll get to those both in a moment, I think.
Larry:
Yeah, I'm really excited about both projects. I can't wait to get to them, but let's talk a little bit about Wikidata first because you started that 2012, is that correct?
Denny:
That's right, yes.
Larry:
What was the impetus for that? What motivated you to start that project?
Denny:
Well, this goes actually back to 2005. Markus Krötzsch and I were PhD students in Karlsruhe and Wikimania was coming to Frankfurt, which is really close to Karlsruhe. It was the very first Wikimania at all. We were both Wikipedians and we wanted to go there and we thought, "What could we do?" And so we connected our research topic, which was the Semantic Web, with Wikipedia and made a proposal there. We didn't really think it would go anywhere. We were just like, "This would be really cool if this happened."
Denny:
But over the next few years, there was so much interest in that people actually started implementing our ideas. We picked up on that. Semantic MediaWiki came out of it. And eventually when I was finishing my PhD, I was asked by Mark Reeves, who was working for Paul Allen's Vulcan back then, he was asking if I would like to make this happen for real. And so we approached the Wikimedia Foundation, we approached Wikimedia movement, and there was great excitement about it. We got the funding aligned and then we started working on Wikidata. This was really a dream come true basically for us who've been working on this idea of bringing structured data and Wikipedia together for more than seven years at that point.
Larry:
That's so interesting because my interest, I mean obviously it goes back aways, but my history of this kind of picks up with Wikidata, so that prehistory of it, connecting Wikipedia to the Semantic Web, which is obviously you're going to end up with something like Wikidata. And you were backed by the Vulcan Foundation or by Paul Allen's foundation?
Denny:
Yes.
Larry:
I did not know that. I lived in Seattle for a long time, so I walked by their building a lot. Well, that's really fascinating. So from 2005 to 2012, was it like simmering or were you doing things like precursors to the launch of Wikidata?
Denny:
We were doing precursive work. We were developing an extension called Semantic MediaWiki, which it is still quite widely used. There are two conferences per year about Semantic MediaWiki users. NASA is using it, for example, on the ISS. Microsoft and many others were also using or are still using it, which is actually integrating structured data into a MediaWiki installation and allowing everyone to build small knowledge graphs to query it and so on.
Denny:
For Wikidata, we took a lot of those lessons. We knew that we needed a little bit different data models. We started actually a different software project where we didn't build it on Semantic MediaWiki but rather something even more structured. Semantic MediaWiki is really good if you want to interleave the text together with the structured data, with the annotations. Whereas, Wikidata really builds a pure knowledge graph, items connecting it and giving it values and so on. But originally we were thinking, "Oh, we'll just switch on Semantic MediaWiki on the Wikipedias. I'm very glad we didn't do that.
Denny:
Actually, just recently, the 10-year anniversary of Wikidata was coming up recently. It's also already three years ago. Markus and Lydia Pintscher, who's the product lead for Wikidata at Wikimedia Deutschland, and I wrote a paper about the history of Wikidata. We were actually going into detail about these topics and how Wikidata came around.
Larry:
Oh, I'll have to link to that paper in the show notes. I'd love to read it. Well, then that's interesting. And then so Wikidata, that was sort of the original... not original, but it was one of the first realizations of the promise of the Semantic Web, and it continues to be in the sense of the unique identifiers and entity resolution and things like that. I assume you consider it a success. It seems like it's such an important part of the knowledge part of the internet.
Denny:
If you ask me, yes, definitely, Wikidata is a resounding success, obviously. It's certainly a much bigger success than we expected. More than half a million people have contributed to Wikidata. If you had asked me in 2010/2011 what the number of people will be who will contribute to such a project, I would be off by more than 10X. I would never have assumed that half a million people would actually contribute to such a project. So I'm really happy. Wikidata is now the most edited wiki in the world by far, even beating English Wikipedia. It is also just very large, very comprehensive. I'm more than excited about how it has developed, and I'm very happy to see how really I was continuing to work after I left Wikidata.
Larry:
Nice. For all of its success though, you see more that could be done in this area, right? Is that where your current projects come from?
Denny:
Yes, absolutely. So Wikidata is a classical knowledge graph. Actually, we went beyond the classical data model already in Wikidata, right? So we are not just like triples, it's not just subject predicate object, we also introduced the ability to have qualifiers on each of those statements. We introduced the ability to have references for every statement and so on. So there was a number of things that we added.
Denny: