Get your software a Wikidata ID! Why Software Developers Should Add Their Projects to Wikidata
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base for structured data mostly known from its use across Wikipedia and other projects in the Wikiverse. Adding your software to Wikidata by creating a Wikidata item for it offers many benefits for both, developers and users. The software will be discoverable in a globally accessible database which improves visibility not only on Wikipedia but also in search engines that rely on the structured data Wikidata provides. Further, Wikidata offers a rich set of metadata such as version history, licensing, programming languages, and dependencies. Its bots complete missing metadata on a regular basis.
Developers can link their software to dependencies, related projects, research, and standards using semantic relationships. This interconnected data helps users understand the software’s context and ecosystem. For research software, being in Wikidata makes it more likely to be cited. Wikidata support multilingual labels and descriptions, helping to reach a global audience. Your software can appear in curated lists and comparisons, such as open-source artificial intelligence software or computational chemistry software.
Users benefit from reliable, machine-readable information about your project. They access details like release dates, supported platforms, and official documentation. Integrations with tools like Scholia generate automatic dashboards for software impact and usage in the research landscape. The SPARQL query service allows anyone to explore software datasets interactively.
In addition to the benefits for individual developers or users, the true power of Wikidata lies in its open and community driven approach. Being part of Wikidata future proofs your project’s metadata in a community maintained ecosystem with community contributions, such as translations, updated links and added semantical relationships to functionalities or papers, datasets and projects your software was used for.
Adding an item takes only a few minutes using the Wikidata interface or automated tools and it adds your software into a global knowledge graph. Just do it.