Wikidata Platform

This is the WMF team that maintains Wikidata Query Service. Not to be confused with Wikibase, which is maintained by Wikimedia Deutschland.

Wikidata Platform is shaping the way users access and query Wikidata at scale. Our goal is to maintain stable, reliable and sustainable data access for Wikidata now and into the future.

Mission

Sustain, develop, and evolve the query platform for Wikidata, one of the world’s largest linked open knowledge graphs. Wikidata facilitates much of the structure of Wikipedia content and contributor activities, making an impact on billions of users across 300+ languages. It also is a critical resource for libraries, universities, and other technology platforms. We enable this global knowledge ecosystem through robust data access capabilities that serve both our internal teams and the public. This includes access to data for editing workflow support, research, feature development, and advancing artificial intelligence responsibly.

What we do

The Wikidata Platform and the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) are fast approaching the upper limits of their technical capacity. As the number of users, requests, and datapoints in the knowledge graph increase, the need for more robust data access capabilities grows. To protect and improve upon the experience members of the Wikidata and Wikimedia communities have become accustomed to, we strive to improve and maintain the performance and stability of the service. We do this through:

• Delivery, development, and maintenance of Wikidata query platform products and services.
• Defining and driving a technical architecture that can maintain stable, reliable and sustainable query systems.

Currently, the primary means of querying Wikidata is via the Wikidata Query Service, where editors, reusers, toolbuilders, and researchers can query Wikidata using SPARQL. In taking on the above mentioned responsibilities, we support the Wikimedia movement by promoting the distribution of all the world's knowledge. We organize our efforts through a prioritization model that evaluates criteria such as impact and alignment with strategic objectives.

Our main focus in 2026-2027 is to migrate Wikidata Query Service’s backend to QLever. We will provide news and updates in our newsletter each month!

Whom we serve

We support the Wikimedia movement and open-knowledge communities at large. They are represented in three high-level categories:

1. Wikidata Contributors & Consumers - As we deepen our understanding of our users and improve our reporting telemetry, we expect this list to grow. Distinct personas within this category include:
   1. Mission-aligned reusers using Wikidata’s data to build applications, services, and AI models.
   2. Contributors to Wikimedia Foundation projects, including editors of Wikipedia, Wikifunctions, etc.
   3. Researchers and other academic users
   4. Technical contributors of Wikidata
2. Wikimedia Deutchland (WMDE) - WMDE is responsible for the end-to-end user experience of Wikidata, building capabilities for their users on the Wikidata Platform. This includes community governance and software development for Wikibase and the Wikibase Cloud. It includes building custom views for WDQS that are tailored to their communities' needs, and more broadly building applications and APIs on the Wikidata Platform to enable their users to interact with, retrieve and edit items and statements on Wikibase instances. As a main consumer and audience of the Wikidata Platform, WMDE's product needs help to guide prioritization for our team. Above all, we share a goal to support the growth and stability of Wikidata and collaborate closely to ensure this goal is met on behalf of the broader community.
3. Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) - Across the Wikimedia Foundation, teams such as Wikimedia Enterprise, Core Experiences, and Abstract Wikipedia have dependencies on the Wikidata platform and/or query service. These teams engage with us on existing and proposed collaborations. We consider product requirements of established and potential use cases as we make platform improvements, understanding that we serve the same mission and many of the same customers.

Current Team

We are a cross-functional group working together with the volunteer community to keep access to Wikidata reliable and easy to build on. This group is part of the Structured Knowledge Platform team.

How to contact us

• Visit our project newsletter page to see the latest issues
• To receive updates directly to your talk page, subscribe by adding your username to this page

Before reaching out to the team through one of the below mechanisms, review our user stories to make sure you're going through the correct channels.

• Wikidata Platform team Phabricator board
• Wikidata query service Phabricator board (see our Best Practices before submitting a request).
• If you think you found a bug and want input from the community and WDP team before opening a request on Phabricator, use our Report a technical issue page.

Internal notes and resources

Meeting schedule

We partner across WMF and WMDE and meet regularly to share updates, host discussions, and align on work plans. Our team spans many time zones, so we rely on asynchronous work to supplement our schedule of face-to-face touch points. Many recurring mechanisms, such as sprint planning, retrospectives, and engineering stand ups, will begin in 2026 when more members are onboarded. A full list of our meetings, along with the series status (Upcoming, Live, Paused), is maintained in our meeting schedule.

Team practices

• New team member onboarding guide (in progress)

Coming soon

• FAQs for common problems
• Sprint retrospective archives
• Roadmaps and team product strategy