Wikimedia CH/Grant apply/Documentation for 2025 Wikidata Graph Split

Infodata

• Name of the project: Documentation for 2025 Wikidata Graph Split
• Amount requested: 5000 CHF
• Type of grantee: Group
• Name of the contact: Lane Rasberry, user:bluerasberry
• Contact: lanerasberrygmail.com

In case of questions, please write to grantwikimedia.ch

The problem and the context

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

The Wikimedia Foundation is splitting the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint, and many user functions will break unless they understand split and change their ways of doing things.

Wikidata is undergoing major changes as the Wikimedia Foundation is splitting its data into two graphs. This is documented on Wikidata and as a May 2024 article in The Signpost. One of the splits will be the data of the d:WikiCite project, and the other will be everything else in Wikidata. The general effect of this is that all citations which seek to match Wikidata items for scholarly publications with any other Wikidata content will break unless rewritten. WikiCite as a project is one of the most developed Wikidata projects, and as such, this split is certain to affect thousands of users. The split is scheduled to occur in March 2025, and there will be a transitional period where a mirror of the full graph is available at a new location until December 2025. After that point, everyone will need to use both graphs to access this content.

None of this is easy to explain to casual users. Additionally, the Wikimedia Foundation is planning major technical upgrades to Wikidata in 2027, and if Wikidata and WikiCite stakeholders are to give community feedback to guide those upgrades, then it is necessary to better describe the problems, possible solutions, and the various user communities which develop WikiCite content.

What is your solution to this problem (please explain the context and the solution)?

We will produce documentation which will support Wikidata users in understanding the graph split and identifying projects related to the graph split where they can contribute.

Project goals

1. Establish and maintain an FAQ on the graph split
   1. Note what Wikidata activities change, and what tools / workflows/ users are affected
2. Convert existing meeting documentation on the graph split into a narrative on Meta-Wiki
3. Report the results of Scholia user survey 2024 to give insight to a WikiCite user community, and to guide a future survey
4. Convert Scholia hackathon outcomes (October 2024, November 2024) into documentation associated with the overall WikiCite project
5. Do storytelling for the proposals of planned Wikidata developments, and why they matter
   1. Benchmarking of potential Blazegraph replacements (Qlever, Virtuoso, any others)
   2. Loading data dumps into a graph engine, then running federated queries with any number of SPARQL endpoints
   3. Re-assessing what content is desirable and reasonable for the Wikidata community to curate in Wikidata
   4. Rewriting Wikidata queries for federation