WikidataCon 2025

The Wikidata ontology is large, multi-domain, and community-created. This results in a considerable number of issues, such as ambiguous classes and questionable subclass relationships, disjointness violations, confusion between subclass and instance, and different modeling decisions in different domains, that undermine reliability and limit or impair use of the ontology. Less attention has been paid to finding and fixing these issues than adding new classes and domains. Improving the Wikidata ontology will take a combination of better tools to help in finding and fixing existing issues, better tools to help editors avoid creating issues, and a change in the community to promote better ontology design. This need not be done solely in a top-down rigid fashion but should instead include creation adoption of coherent, well-described ontoological principles that gain acceptance through use. The goal is not perfection, but an ontology sufficiently cohesive and consistent to enable robust inferencing and use in applications.