Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy

There's more to the Wikimedia organization than the famous encyclopedia

Comment Multiple other projects also use the vast linked data store that underpins ubiquitous internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and some of them are helping the fight for democracy.

Wikipedia is big, but even so, it's bigger than it looks. For a start, the encyclopedia itself is larger than it appears: there are active Wikipedias in 342 different languages. More than 65 million articles and over 273 million pages, and they are all linked to each other within each language as well as between languages. The result is a vast linked knowledge graph, and it's free, open source, and multilingual.

Wikidata is the part of the organization which manages this database. It underpins multiple other sites and projects than just the very visible encyclopedia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project uses it to power Aleph which helps about 25,000 investigative journalists track people and companies. WikiFlix, launched last month, is a free, no-registration-needed streaming service for non-copyrighted films. Cividata is an worldwide index of charities and non-profits. The GLAM mapping project indexes and maps Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.

The Register talked to two of these Wikidata-backed projects.

GovDirectory

Jan Ainali of Open by Default told us that he had the idea for GovDirectory "back in about 2016, when Twitter was still good." It's easy to describe, but hard to achieve: it aspires to be a directory of all government organizations in the world, where they are, and how to contact them. A core problem is that because nothing like this exists, they don't know for sure how many such departments exist. They estimate that there could be as many as 800,000 agencies.

So far, GovDirectory has about 13,000 agencies across nearly 40 countries. It lists websites and official presences or accounts on social media.

Other issues the team has encountered might be surprising if you've never had to try to do this yourself, although they probably won't shock any weary technologist. Project member Albin Larsson told us of some amusing hiccups they encountered getting started in his native Sweden. One agency had an official Flickr account, but nobody in the agency knew who had the password. Two government agencies worked on tracking other Swedish government agencies and maintaining lists, for instance, embassies – but their lists did not match. Before he emigrated over a decade ago, the Reg FOSS desk was British, and as such knows of some loose equivalents to GovDirectory for Brits. TheyWorkForYou is a searchable index of UK parliamentary representatives. It launched in 2004 at NotCon04, as an offshoot of the excellent and much-missed satirical email newsletter NeedToKnow. It's now a part of MySociety, as is its partner site WriteToThem which makes it very easy to contact each Member of Parliament directly.

In the past, this vulture has also found SayNoTo0870 very helpful – especially as an emigré Brit trying to contact organizations and companies in the UK from outside the country. That also includes from nearby countries. Speaking personally, we lost track of how many calls we placed to the UK Visas and Immigration Department, whose contact page is notably devoid of any contact information.

For non-Brits, 0870 numbers are the UK's original non-geographic phone dialling codes. Companies can use them to direct calls to switchboards and call-centres, and that also led to the rise of premium rate contact numbers – which generally can't be dialled from outside the country. (The same often applies to US 1-800 numbers.)

A free, global, verified, multilingual service that covered this sort of functionality sounds very useful indeed to us — even if you never leave your homeland in your life.

For US readers, a more topical example of the value of this sort of service is the ICE List, which the inimitable Jamie Zawinski blogged about some days ago. At the time of writing, we can't get to it, but this Internet Archive snapshot gives you the flavor: "Crowdsourced database of individuals involved in deportations, ICE operations, and associated abuses."

AletheiaFact

We also spoke with Mateus Santos and Tamiris Tinti Volcean from the Aletheia Fact Movement. Its AletheiaFact site is a very different sort of effort. Santos gave a talk at FOSDEM 2024 about the platform, and the intro there has a good potted introduction.

(The name comes from Aletheia, which is the term for truth or disclosure in ancient Greek philosophy. You may not know it – we didn't – but we recognized its antonym: Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.)

AletheiaFact is a fact-checking service, inspired in part by a Czech site, Demagog.cz [🇨🇿 Čeština]. For now, it mainly focuses on Brazilian Portuguese, but it would be useful around the world. Volcean told us that it's supported by the Comitê Nacional de Democratização da Checagem de Fatos – the National Committee for the Democratization of Fact-Checking – and it was a finalist in the World Summit Information Society's WSIS Prizes 2025.

The former government of Brazil and its leader Jair Bolsonaro had, to say the least, a troubled history of dealing with the truth. This included persecuting journalists, and in its time, there were mysterious cyberattacks on the legal system. Fortunately, current leader Luiz Inacio da Silva is more open–minded – for instance, he was in the past a supporter of open source.

Volcean told us "Today, in Brazil, it's impossible to debate without disinformation. They distribute it with social media. We need to educate people how to consume it: how to find sources, and how to find trust — how to do the process of fact-checking."

Santos told us that although AletheiaFact.org isn't a direct Wikidata project, its backing has been very helpful. Drawing on Wikidata means the site can be crawled by search engines, and the knowledge base means that they can plug into other schemas. An example was that it allows some basic automated fact-checking – i.e the shape of the Earth. (To which we can only say, O tempora! O mores!.)

"Wikidata allowed us to create a product very fast, and the wiki movement's choices help – for example, the notability criteria for adding people."

That is very much not just a Brazilian problem. To pick one sad example, ever since reporting on the Xlibre project, this vulture has seen more dinsinformation from anti-vaxxers than in the year so far. As a parent, this particular evil fiction is one we especially detest. In our book, anything that helps expose conspiracy theorists is a very good thing. ®