This post is a follow up to the session I hosted at WikidataCon 2017 along with Stuart Prior from WikimediaUK (standing in for John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO) Data partnerships with reputable third parties are really important for the future of Wikidata. If we get this right it will alleviate a lot of the manual work needed keeping general facts about the world up to date, whilst simultaneously giving greater authority to Wikidata in terms of completeness and accuracy (not to mention consistency!

Screenshot from the tool showing paintings by Vincent Van Gogh Two years ago, I attended Wikidata's 3rd birthday celebrations in the Wikimedia Deutschland offices in Berlin. One thing that stuck out to me was the amazing tools and work people were presenting as birthday presents to Wikidata. So, this year at WikidataCon, where we celebrated Wikidata's 5th birthday, it was a real pleasure to be able to present a new version of our tool for visualising Wikidata on interactive timelines.

In our opinion WikidataCon 2017 was a resounding success. We re-connected with many fellow Wikimedians and met new connections both inside and outside of the Wikimedia Community. The mood of the conference was one of improvement, collaboration and discussion, personally it felt like the unofficial theme of the conference was: "The potential impact of Wikidata on our world is immense, let's make sure we realise that potential" Few things worth doing are easy, and the Wikidata project is certainly not exempt from this rule, few projects outside of Wikipedia itself come close to the scope of what is trying to be achieved with Wikidata.