Jump to content

Wikibase/Wikibase.cloud

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Project

[edit]

Wikibase.cloud is a cloud-based platform developed by Wikimedia Deutschland (Wikimedia.de) to host instances of Wikibase. Wikibase is an open-source software suite for creating collaborative knowledge bases. Originally developed for Wikidata, the Wikibase project is being actively developed and maintained by the team at Wikimedia Deutschland. With Wikibase.cloud, we want to make it easier than ever to create, connect and grow a linked open database. In so doing, we aim to liberate data from silos and increase access to knowledge around the world.

Wikibase.cloud is now in Open Beta -- feel free to sign up now! Consider adding your instance to wikibase.world, an invaluable community-run site for Wikibase and the various instances you can find across the net.

We'd like to say a special thanks to Adam Shorland for building WBStack on which Wikibase Cloud is based, and Rhizome, for their support, innovation and leadership.

Resources

[edit]

Connect with the Wikibase.cloud community:

Documentation:

Contact us

[edit]

As with all Wikimedia projects, we use the public ticketing system Phabricator (phabricator.wikimedia.org). You can keep up with our progress via the Wikibase.cloud Phabricator board. Otherwise, reach out to us at swe_partnerships@wikimedia.de.

Updates

[edit]

Q1 2026

[edit]
  • Query Federation (this initiative is not Wikibase Cloud-specific, but rather the team's contribution to the Wikibase Ecosystem development)
    • We complemented the growth of the Wikidata Allowlist with an effort to ensure the availability of listed endpoints. A significant share of endpoints on the Allowlist were non-operational, causing federated queries to fail or time out without a clear explanation. Through systematic manual monitoring, we identified non-operational endpoints, and then either removed them, or reached out to their maintainers to fix problems on their side. As a result, the share of consistently non-operational endpoints decreased from 30% to 14%.
    • ➡️ Next quarter, we will decide how we could automate these checks to ensure that endpoints on the Allowlist are consistently available going forward.
  • Data Governance
    • We iterated on the Hosting Policy through community consultation and internal review. Legal clarification established that the policy must be a binding document accepted alongside the Terms of Use, which shaped its final form.
    • We moved from policy drafting to preparing its implementation. We designed the first version of the process, including the pilot plan, review templates, application tracking setup, questionnaire, and tested parts of it on a small number of instances. In parallel, we aligned the rollout plan with the Terms of Use update (see below).
    • ➡️ Next quarter, we will invite our users to participate in the pilot of the process, so that we could try it out on real instances and identify necessary improvements before enforcing the policy.
    • As a first step towards collecting the information relevant to the review process, we ask users creating new Wikibase instances to declare whether they contribute to knowledge equity in the Wikibase ecosystem in any way (part of the application that users will need to submit to request the permanent residence on the platform).
    • ➡️ Next quarter, we plan to allow placing a licensing statement in the wiki footer, so that the users could meet one of the required conditions from the Hosting Policy.
  • DSA Compliance & Terms of Use Update
    • Was not pursued during this quarter. Rollout plans merged with the Hosting Policy.
    • ➡️ Next quarter, we will be mostly focused on implementing all the necessary workflows to update the Terms of Use, enforce the Hosting Policy and ensure users accept them.

Q3-Q4 2025

[edit]
  • Feature Parity with Wikidata
    • We updated the MediaWiki version to 1.43, reducing the gap with Wikidata, and implemented some improvements of the update process to make next updates easier.
    • Through this update, we enabled REST API on all instances of Wikibase Cloud.
    • Through this update, we also enabled the default language code functionality (aka 'mul'); however, its users reported a degraded search experience.
  • Query Federation (this initiative is not Wikibase Cloud-specific, but rather the team's contribution to the Wikibase Ecosystem development)
    • After attempting to establish a meaningful metric for query federation in the Wikibase Ecosystem in Q2, we identified significant data limitations and shifted focus to a more actionable proxy: increasing the Wikidata Allowlist as a measure of users’ ability to federate queries from Wikidata to other SPARQL endpoints. We drove this through manual discovery of relevant endpoints, improvements to the nomination process, and increasing its visibility. By end of December 2025, 28 new endpoints had been added to the Allowlist; however, we began questioning whether this proxy reflects meaningful user impact.
    • All other responsibilities around federated querying (unrelated to the Wikidata Allowlist) have shifted to another team.
  • Data Governance
    • We improved our understanding of how Wikibase Cloud instances are actually used, increasing the share of active instances with known purpose to 92% in December. This required follow-up with instance managers through global and personalized outreach to encourage them fill out the Intended Use section of their Wiki Profile. The resulting data informed the emerging hosting policy.
    • We moved the data governance initiative from research into drafting of the hosting policy. We aligned on the scope of the policy, synthesized the relevant insights, and produced a first draft, which was ready for community consultation by the end of December.
  • DSA Compliance & Terms of Use Update
    • We prepared the Terms of Use update needed for DSA compliance. Most stories and designs were created, and remaining legal questions were clarified with leadership and lawyers.
    • In accordance with the DSA requirements, users can now report illegal content to us.
  • Other
    • We deployed Anubis to fight off the scraper traffic. It introduced several problems for our users that we also had to address.
    • We integrated archived Bitnami charts and container images, as Bitnami announced discontinuation of free charts and container images from Aug 28th onward.
    • We improved the process for handling GDPR-based personal data removal requests submitted to Wikimedia Deutschland.
    • We published our User Agent policy.
    • Resolved an incident when bulk import of a large number of triples in one instance dropped Query Service updates for everyone.

Q2 2025

[edit]
  • Achieved in this quarter:
    • Owners of existing Wikibase Cloud instances can now specify the intended purposes, lifespan and target audience for them. This helps us understand the use cases behind individual instances to make strategic decisions around the acceptable use of the platform.
    • We designed and sent out the Data Governance Research activity to our users as part of the initiative to craft the acceptable use policy for Wikibase Cloud. In this activity, our users and stakeholders assign hypothetical use cases to different products in our ecosystem.
    • We have been focusing on establishing high-level metrics to measure the volume of query federation happening in the Wikibase ecosystem. Wikidata Query Service is the only place in the ecosystem that currently has some kind of data infrastructure, so we started by looking at it and improved on our capability to get meaningful insights from it.
      • We made sure that appropriate user agents are set from Wikibase Cloud, so we could differentiate queries based on their provenance (for example, whether they are coming from QS UI or from a QS of another Wikibase Cloud instance).
      • We can also now recognize queries that were executed on the main Wikidata graph vs. the scholarly articles graph.
    • We started a series of publications focusing on the stories of holders of marginalized knowledge using Wikibase Cloud: Post 1 , Post 2.
    • We made a number of small fixes in the Query Service UI (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T358602, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T399300).
    • We have established the missing metrics for the platform to allow us to monitor its health and growth and do the necessary reporting.
    • OAuth2 consumers bug fix: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T336937
  • Plans for next quarter:
    • We’re fighting off the attack of bad traffic and exploring long-term solutions for this.: https://wmde.github.io/wikibase-cloud-status/issues/2025-07-15-scrapers-again/
    • We want to improve on the user’s ability to federate queries (focusing on opportunities related to the Allowlist). This also includes establishing a way to measure our impact with meaningful metrics.
    • In order to make the platform compliant with the Digital Services Act, we will introduce a way for the users to report illegal content. We will also update our Terms of Use.
    • We resumed our work on Mediawiki 1.43 update.
    • We want to complete & synthesize the data governance research. This will become the foundation for the draft of the Acceptable Use Policy that we will later request feedback for.
    • We want to continue the series of publications focusing on the stories of holders of marginalized knowledge using Wikibase Cloud.


Previously

[edit]

April 8, 2025

  • What we’ve done:
    • When one creates a new Wikibase instance, we ask about its intended purpose, lifespan and target audience. We will later start collecting the same information about pre-existing instances as well, to better understand the use cases of individual instances.
    • Addressed several incidents:
      • Fixed the broken status page.
      • We were impacted by a significant increase in traffic that we attribute to scraping activity. This brought the sites down multiple times and we have worked to mitigate this.
      • Solved the problem with database connections failing.
    • Added robots.txt to MediaWiki behind Cloud instances to reduce the performance load created by engine crawlers.
    • Updated Cradle and Quick Statements
    • Added support of a shapes expression validator to simplify validation of entity schemas (like on Wikidata)
    • Small UI fixes: 1, 2
  • What we’re working on:
    • Introducing new approach to metric tracking to evaluate health of the ecosystem
    • Introducing the workflow to collect information on the intended purpose, lifespan and target audience of pre-existing instances
    • Updating to MediaWiki 1.43

December 17, 2024

  • What we’ve done:
    • Solved the problem of user sessions randomly disappearing making the service and surrounding tools unusable: 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Temporarily disabled the Graph Builder functionality in Query Service, as it is not functioning correctly. We will re-enable it when the responsible team fixes the functionality upstream.
    • Made some copy improvements in our automated emails and fixed some links that were leading to the wrong places
    • Some copy and UX/UI improvements on wikibase.cloud and Status page. Also check out the new default logo on the Wikibase instances!:)
    • Started Cloud’s own FAQ page, since the one for Wikibase was mostly useless to our users.
  • What we’re working on:
    • Investigating how to enabled Query Builder and Quality Constraints
    • Planning some long-overdue software updates
    • An announcement of our plans for 2025 will follow after the official WMDE strategy announcement.
    • The Wikibase Cloud team wishes you happy holidays! 🎄⭐ ☃️

November 21st 2024

  • What we’ve done:
    • Visual Editor is now enabled for everyone. It allows editing pages as rich content rather than as source markup code.
    • Enabled personal scripts and personal stylesheets. All Cloud users can now customize their UI experience by editing their own Special:MyPage/common.js, Special:MyPage/common.css and other personal scripts and stylesheets.
      • Setting up global scripts (like MediaWiki:common.js) remains unavailable even to admins.
      • Setting up global stylesheets (like MediaWiki:common.css) remains available to admins as before.
    • Previously, Query Service on Wikibase Cloud only allowed federated queries to the same endpoints that are allowed for Wikidata. Last month, we also whitelisted other Wikibase Cloud instances that already existed at that point. From now on, all new Wikibase Cloud instances will be automatically whitelisted for query federation from other Cloud instances every Monday.
    • Resolved a couple related bugs with QuickStatements: 1, 2
    • Resolved a couple bugs for Query Service: 1, 2
    • We disabled the Graph extension for everyone because of a major security risk.
    • Sped up our deployment process
    • Performed some software updates (Minikube and Kubernetes)
    • Fixed the misconfiguration that prevented using Lexemes in Wikitext via Lua modules
    • Fixed the link from the Contact page to FAQs
  • What we are working on:
    • We want to address the problem with user sessions randomly disappearing
    • We want to enable Query Builder and Quality Constraints
    • We are investing 1 week to fix a large amount of several low-hanging copy and UI problems all around the place

October 16th 2024

  • Status of cloud access
    • 1502 wikis in total, incl. 418 deleted ones
  • News from the product team:
    • We enabled federated queries across already existing instances. We plan to automatically include emerging instances into the scope of federation later.
    • The usability research to identify opportunities that will improve experience for novice users is complete.
    • We established an approach to measuring health metrics for the product and tried it out. We will build on this to settle on a sustainable solution in the future.
    • We performed some important software updates and addressed a security problem.
  • Here is what we are currently focusing on:
    • Including emerging instances into the scope of federation.
    • Addressing low-hanging bug fixes, features familiar from Wikidata, quick copy and UI improvements.

September 5th 2024

  • Status of cloud access
    • 1415 in total, incl. 390 that have already been deleted
  • News from the product team:
    • First important milestones achieved in the initiatives related to automation of testing and deployment
    • A new dialog introduced to learn more about the reasons why managers delete their Wikibase Cloud instances
    • First iteration of the feature to import entities from Wikidata implemented. Managers can import a fixed set of entities curated by the Wikibase Cloud team once per instance. The list of entities currently includes several properties (Mother, Father, Child, Image, Instance of, Subclass of) and items (Universe, World, Human, Berlin, Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). In the future we might let the users choose the entities for import. Due to incompatibility with the Wikidata’s default label feature, the entities are currently imported in a state from July 28, 2024. The problem will be resolved when Wikibase Cloud switches to the same long term support version of Wikibase that Wikidata is running on.
    • Each new Wikibase now gets a new default main page that guides the users in kicking off their instance.
    • Users can now illustrate their entities with images from Wikimedia Commons.
    • We optimized how the search engine (Elasticsearch) is shared across instances. This reduces costs for maintenance, complexity, stability of the system and makes it easier to manage. We expect that this will also significantly increase our capacity to work on new features.
  • Here is what we are currently focusing on:
    • Synthesizing the results of the recent usability research to identify opportunities to improve experience for novice users
    • Revising our metrics and improving data instrumentation to be able to track our progress more reliably
    • Identifying the useful features familiar from Wikidata that could easily be enabled on all instances to improve feature parity between different Wikimedia products and facilitate transition of users between them
    • Identifying the confusing features that would benefit from better documentation
    • Exploring ways to differentiate between instances with valuable knowledge that is intended for re-use and instances used for experimentation and data preparation
  • Anything else worth mentioning:
    • We completed our first research of knowledge equity in Linked Open Data. The results are published here.

February 9th 2024

January 10th 2024

  • Status of cloud access
    • 824 Wikibases on cloud total
  • News from engineering:
  • Anything else worth mentioning:
    • Next Wikibase Live Session on 25th of January
    • End of the year survey share-out coming soon!
    • Wikidata & Wikibase office hours on 17th of January

More at /Updates/2023 and /Updates/2022

Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibase/Wikibase.cloud&oldid=30484298"