WikidataCon 2025: Wikibase as a Data Sharing Space

Wikibase is often seen as a tool for semantic and technical interoperability. But the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) reminds us that digital public services — from GLAM to statistical infrastructures — require alignment on four layers: legal, organisational, semantic, and technical. Our experience shows that while the semantic and technical layers are well developed in the Wikibase/Wikidata ecosystem, the legal and organisational layers are decisive if we want true federation and co-curation across institutions and communities.

This presentation introduces three diverse Wikibase-based Data Sharing Spaces (DSSs): the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database, the Finno-Ugric DSS (https://reprexbase.eu/fu/index.php?ti... ), and TextileBase (https://reprexbase.eu/textilebase/ ). These cases demonstrate two distinctive curatorial challenges:
– Finno-Ugric DSS: reconnecting dispersed minority heritage across several countries and languages, where community epistemologies must be reconciled with institutional metadata.
– Slovak Comprehensive Music Database: cutting across unusually complex public/private boundaries, where rights agencies, libraries, and the National Library operate under very different data governance regimes.

By combining Wikibase with pragmatic legal and organisational design, these DSSs achieve the kind of federation that European policy papers and digital heritage scholarship often describe but rarely realise. We will also share our conceptual multilingual Wikimuseum exhibition, co-curated with Wikimedia Eesti and several museums and to be presented at Wikimedia CEE 2025, as a live example of how dispersed collections can be federated into a co-curated digital service.

Speaker: antaldaniel