Thanks to the initiative of Andra Waagmeester and Daniel Mietchen (who are part of the community that is behind Wikidata incorporating such staggering inputs as the complete human genome) we ventured a first workshop of projects that have begun to use the Wikibase software outside the original Wikimedia/Wikidata environment. The event at Antwerp’s fifteenth-century hospice, now the Elzenveld hotel and conference centre, was generously funded by the European Research Council. The participants came from fields which only this software would bring together: the natural sciences, the humanities, the social and political sphere and Wikimedia. Wikidata, the Wikimedia project in the centre, is about to become the broadest compound in the world of collaboratively produced knowledge. Starting with interconnecting the 290 Wikipedias all around the globe it became able to switch between all their respective languages. Knowing all the equivalents of articles as well as all the unique items which individual communities created on their Wikipedias Wikidata is closer than any comparable compound to theoretically knowing what a father, a cat, a religion or a novel structurally is. The multilingual competence is matched only by the database’s openness to all sorts of items: Wikidata is dealing with bacteria, the Mona Lisa, Chinese politicians, obscure philosophical concepts, mathematical equations, individual genes, geo-coordinates, and all sorts of properties and qualities these items can gain. The software is open to the flexible creation of ever new properties interconnecting the bricks. You can read Wikidata on the Reasonator and you can explore Wikidata with machines. It is open to logic, accessible in ever new SPARQL queries – the search language worth learning.
[...]