Wikidata is one of the most important and exciting innovations in the world around Wikipedia. To make it accessible to a wide range of users, it needs its user interface to be translated to as many languages as possible, and you can help.
At the first stage, already partly enabled, Wikidata stores “interwiki links”, i.e. page metadata that connect articles about a same topic on different language versions of Wikipedia. Historically, these interwiki links have been duplicated and stored in each of the pages they linked together. With Wikidata, the list of pages about a same topic is centralized.
The next goal of Wikidata is to store not only page metadata like interwiki links, but also common data that is repeated in all languages, such as census data for cities and dates of birth and death of famous authors.
Practically all the projects that are related to Wikipedia are massively multilingual, but Wikidata is especially so: it stores common data with the goal of displaying it efficiently in all languages.
The very useful and famous CIA World Factbook site has tables of data about all countries in the world, but the labels are only written in English. Now imagine a site with such tables, but with the ability to display the labels in any language and not just English: that’s what Wikidata aims to become.
In the near future, the translation of such table labels will be done on the Wikidata website itself. In the meantime, you can help by translating the user interface displayed by the software running Wikidata.
Translation of the Wikidata software is done on translatewiki.net, the same translation platform used to translate Wikipedia’s interface. Wikidata relies on three main components that need translating: Wikibase – Repo, Wikibase – Client and Wikibase – Lib.
Wikipedia made encyclopedic articles open and accessible; Wikidata is about to do the same to statistics and other structured information. To ensure that people speaking your language can benefit from the immense potential of Wikidata, and contribute to its success, please join us today and help us translate it.
Thank you!
Software Engineer (Internationalization)
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