Wikipedia and the Semantic Web: Celebrating 20 Years of Co-Development and the Future

In 2005, the very first papers proposed integrating Semantic Web technologies in the nascent Wikipedia ecosystem. This wasn’t just a convergence; it ignited two decades of mutual inspiration and benefit. From this crucible, the work in semantic wikis drew inspiration. Semantic MediaWiki, particularly, which found global adoption at Google, Microsoft, NASA, and beyond. Wikipedia became the bedrock for pioneering knowledge graphs, including DBpedia, Freebase, and Yago. These pivotal experiences directly fueled the development of Knowledge Graph, a term that has since found ubiquitous adoption, and, critically, Wikidata, a project that has become an indispensable, living component of Wikipedia itself. With over half a million global contributors, Wikidata stands as the world’s most-edited wiki, powering one of, if not the, most widely-used public SPARQL endpoint. Its software, Wikibase, has spawned a federation of knowledge graphs, serving diverse domains from museums to language preservation. Furthermore, Wikidata’s evolution into lexicographic data (inspired by ontologies such as OntoLex and Lemon) laid the groundwork for projects such as Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, a vision first unveiled right here at ISWC 2018 and now an official Wikimedia Foundation project. This takes us to the present and future: Abstract Wikipedia collaboratively confronts the inherent expressivity gap in knowledge graphs, while foundational role in training and the current use of language models can not be overstated. This creates a tantalising confluence of large language models and knowledge graphs, hinting at profound opportunities - and critical challenges -for Wikipedia, the Web, and beyond. As this rich history promises many more years of co-development and mutual inspiration, we will conclude with a forward-looking sketch of open research questions and exciting upcoming opportunities.

Rescuing Scholia #3: We did it!

It was not a set up, when I openly wondered if we would be able to rescue Scholia in time. I honestly did not know. Three weeks and some serious hacking by an international team later I was more optimistic. Actually, just before christmas, we started writing a SWAT4HCLS 2026 demonstration abstract. This was accepted and you can read the Scholia 2026: Compliance with SPARQL 1.1 preprint here and here. This paper describes the work that had to be done, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who contributed with smaller or bigger contributions (Daniel, Peter, Konrad, Johannes, Lars, Wolfgang, Hannah). I am merely first author for the demo, and just another contributor to the long series of patches, in a branch started by Prof. Hannah Bast.

Wikibase/Indexing/RDF Dump Format - MediaWiki