Annual Report 2025/Story: Multiple contributions to data structuring for increased and improved reuse
In this story, we describe how Wikimedia Sverige has helped make free knowledge more searchable, more reusable, and easier to build on.
Through work on structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the further development of tools, and international collaborations, we have both strengthened the technical infrastructure and demonstrated how structured data can be used in different contexts.
Structured data is an important piece of the work for free knowledge that the Wikimedia Community is doing.
When information is described in a consistent and machine-readable way, it becomes easier to find the right material, connect resources from different sources, and reuse them on other websites and in external applications. Not to mention possible AI applications, now that artificial intelligence is on everyone's lips. In 2025, Wikimedia Sverige therefore continued to invest both in infrastructure, modelling, and concrete improvements to data on the Wikimedia platforms - but also in technical solutions that can benefit many others.
At the same time, we contributed to the broader technical ecosystem around structured data. There is a wide range of technical tools, large and small, that Wikimedians use in their daily work. Many of them have been developed by volunteers who identified specific needs within the community. One of them, Listeria, can create and automatically update lists of Wikidata items that meet certain criteria and publish them on wiki pages. The tool is popular and loved because it lowers the threshold for Wikimedians, mainly on the various language versions of Wikipedia, to get an overview of Wikidata content.
Since Metabase, our platform for structured knowledge about the activities of the Wikimedia movement, uses technical infrastructure similar to that of Wikidata, we wanted to implement Listeria there as well. However, this could not be done automatically - as it could for a Wikipedia edition in a new language - because Metabase is a standalone project and not part of the Wikimedia ecosystem. During the year, we worked with several technical solutions based on linked data, and for that reason we also saw value in further developing Listeria for new contexts by creating a Metabase-adapted version of the tool. To do this, we hired the developer of Listeria, who was able to take on the project. Listeria can now be used on Metabase, making it easier for us to quickly produce easy-to-read lists, such as this one showing all GLAM Call events in our database. Readers can now see the list without having to write and run a SPARQL query, just as on the Wikimedia platforms.
This version of Listeria works only on Metabase, but we have been in contact with the developers behind Wikibase Cloud, the platform on which Metabase and many other databases are hosted. There is a possibility that Listeria could be implemented there in the future. Our contribution has therefore created an opportunity not only to benefit ourselves, but also others who use free software to develop their own linked data resources, many of whom are not even Wikimedians.
Ett annat projekt som kretsar runt maskinläsbara länkade data och som vi började jobba med under 2025 är CommonsDB. Projektet går ut på att testa ett interoperabelt offentligt register över rättighetsinformation för verk som omfattas av öppna licenser eller är i public domain. I praktiken innebär det att användare ska kunna verifiera rättighetsstatus på filer från olika källor. Registret levererar ett maskinläsbart, och verifierbart svar om någon organisation har deklarerat rättighetsstatus på det visuella verket tidigare. Projektet finansieras av Europeiska kommissionen och Wikimedia Sverige ingår i ett konsortium, tillsammans med flera andra organisationer, för att utveckla en prototyp. Projektet banar väg för nästa generations infrastruktur för fri kunskap genom att göra data om rättigheter mer tillgängliga och verifierbara, och det finns goda chanser att prototypen fortsätter att utvecklas efter projektets slut.
We also continued our work on Structured Data on Commons (SDC), a web of links between media files on Wikimedia Commons and items on Wikidata. For example, a photograph depicting a runestone can be linked to its Wikidata item, which contains detailed information about it, such as the municipality where it is located, its geographic coordinates, and its age, drawn from a reliable source. Another type of connection that SDC makes possible is between files from GLAM collections and their records in the institutions' own systems. A typical example is the images that Wikimedia Sverige helps museums share on Wikimedia Commons, which become easier to connect back to the museum with the help of SDC links.
In 2025, we did some dedicated work to improve structured data in several Wikimedia Commons collections connected to Swedish cultural heritage. One focus area was photographs from Nordiska museet, which we uploaded both during this year and in previous years as part of the museum's major digitization initiatives 100 000 Bildminnen, Hotade minnen and Bildminnen för framtiden, in which more than 3000 images were linked to the DigitaltMuseum platform.
Another major project concerned Swedish archaeological monuments. When the Swedish National Heritage Board updated its identifier system a few years ago, more than 140 000 Wikidata items ended up containing broken links. This in turn affected the thousands of files on Wikimedia Commons, many of them uploaded through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest, that had SDC links to these monuments. Since WMSE has a good working relationship with the Swedish National Heritage Board, we were able to communicate the need to update Wikidata and received valuable advice on how this major task could be carried out efficiently. The Wikidata items were updated with new identifiers, and as a result many thousands of links from Wikimedia Commons became usable again.
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