Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Wikidata summit day 1

Wikidata Summit kicks off in Berlin

The 2-day event is focusing on Wikidata and RENDER, technologies to integrate structured data with Wikipedia and its sister sites.

The Wikidata & RENDER summit, a 2-day technical event focusing on the integration of structured data with Wikipedia, started today in Berlin, Germany, as a prologue to the Wikimedia Hackathon.

The event, organized by Wikimedia Deutschland, consists of workshops, presentations and coding, split into two tracks: one on Wikidata, and the second on RENDER.

The Wikidata project was announced earlier this year; its goal is to build the software infrastructure to support a common source of structured data that can be used in all Wikipedia articles, regardless of their language.

It would work in the same way that images and other multimedia content from Wikimedia Commons can be embedded into any page on a Wikimedia site.

About 50 engineers and volunteer developers have gathered in Berlin for this prelude to the Wikimedia hackathon.

Wikidata is expected to lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, increased availability of information in the smaller language editions, and decreased maintenance effort for Wikipedia volunteers.

RENDER, the other focus of this summit, is a EU-funded project aimed at developing methods, techniques, software and data sets to scholars and readers (such as Wikipedia users) to understand, describe, process and make use of the diversity of knowledge and information.

About fifty people were invited to attend: they are Wikimedia Deutschland engineers, Wikimedia Foundation engineers, and volunteer MediaWiki developers, with expertise in structured data, MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects.

Sessions will be held today and tomorrow at Station-berlin - Hall 6, the same venue where the Berlin Hackathon 2012 (a.k.a. "Wikimedia Dev days") will take place, starting tomorrow evening.

Follow and participate

We don't have live video streaming of the event, but you can follow what's happening on site through a variety of channels:

• participants are taking live collaborative notes that will be posted on wiki after sessions are over;
• they're also posting information snippets on Twitter and Identi.ca; join the discussion with the #wikidata and #RENDER hashtags;
• last, you can join us on IRC in the #wikimedia-wikidata and #mediawiki channels on Freenode.

Let us know on IRC or in the comments below if we can do anything else to let you participate remotely.

Guillaume Paumier Technical communications manager