Visualizing Wikibase ecosystem, using wikibase.world

In October last year, I wrote a post starting to visualize the connections between Wikibases in the ecosystem that had been found and collected on wikibase.world thanks to my bot that I occasionally run. That post made use of the query service visualizations, and in this post I’ll take the visualizations a step further, making use of IPython notebooks and plotly.

Previously I reported the total number of Wikibases tracked in wikibase.world being around 784, with around 755 being active (however I didn’t write down exactly how I determined this). So I’m going to take another stab at that with some code backing up the determinations, rather than just my late night data ramblings.

All of the data shown in this post is generated from the IPython notebook available on Github, on 16 Feb 2025, based on the data on wikibase.world which is maintained as a best effort system.

General numbers

Metric	Value
Wikibases with properties	777
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages	600
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages, and 1 or more active users	264
Wikibases with properties, and more than 10 pages, and 2 or more active users	129
Wikibases that link to other wikibases	194
Wikibases that only link to non Wikimedia Foundation wikibases	5
Wikibases that link to other wikibases, excluding Wikimedia Foundation	35

A few things of note:

• “with properties” is used, as a clear indicator that Wikibase is not only installed, but also used in at least a very basic way. (ie, it has a created Wikibase property). I would use the number of items ideally as a measure here, however as far as I can tell, this is hard to figure out?)
• “with more than 10 pages” is my baseline measure of the site having some content, however this applies across all namespaces, so can also be wikitext pages…
• “active users” are taken from MediaWiki statistics, and apply across all namespaces. These numbers also rely on MediaWiki being correctly maintained and these numbers actually being updated. (Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days)
• “link to other wikibases” are links extracted from sites by Addbot either via external links or specific properties that state they are links to other wikibases. (The code is not pretty, but gives us an initial view)

And summarized in words:

• 264 Wikibases with some content that have been edited in the past 30 days
• 194 Wikibases link in some way to other Wikibases
  • Excluding links to Wikidata and Commons, this number comes down to 35 (So Wikidata is very much the centre)

And of course, take all of this with a pinch of salt, these numbers are an initial stab at trying to have an overview of the ecosystem.

An updated web

My October post included some basic visualizations from the query service of wikibase.world.

However, it’s time to get a little more fancy and interactive. (As well as showing all wikibases, not just the linked ones)

• This graph shows the 777 wikibases mentioned above
• Links between nodes represent links between wikibases
• Size of the node represents the number of active users
• Colour of the node represents the host of the wikibase (see key)
• Hover over nodes to see more information

Some things of note:

• Wikibase.cloud currently hosts the most wikibases (by far), but more on that later
• Many of these sites according to MediaWiki currently have 0 active users, however they all have some level of content
• The most active sites in terms of users often include large sections of the content / site that are also not Wikibase focused (regular articles and pages)

Host metrics

As can be seen in the web above, wikibase.cloud currently hosts the most wikibases, roughly 91% of the wikibases that have been collected on wikibase.world.

The other host groups currently are, unknown, independently hosted, The Wikibase Consultancy, Wikimedia Foundation, Miraheze and Wikimedia Cloud services.

Coming up second and third as recorded on wikibase.world is the “unknown” category, and also the “independently hosted Wikibase category”. However these groups are pretty vague and don’t really help us understand how or where these sites are hosted.

Looking at this generic concept of “host” as a slice through the ecosystem, we can see that the Wikimedia Foundation hosted wikibases have the most active users by far. These 63k users (across Wikidata and Commons) potentially contain duplicates that work across both of the projects.

Excluding these WMF sites, we see that the group with the most active users, at around 887, comes from the independently hosted wikibases. Looking specifically at these wikibases, they are often the sites that have lots of non-wikibase content alongside the wikibase entities.

Wikibase.cloud comes in third with 448 active users, but as with the WMF sites, there is likely some duplication in this number with users that have multiple sites.

Trying to look at content, the only mildly useful number I have collected in wikibase.world so far is the number of properties.

Interestingly, here we can see that the total number of properties defined outside of Wikidata, now exceeds the number of properties defined within Wikidata (currently around 21.5k), vs the roughly 80k external.

Of course, there will be lots of duplicates and properties that are ultimately the same as others, but looking into that would be for another day.

Versions

Most wikibases are on 1.39.7. This is every wikibase.cloud wiki, as well as one other non wikibase.cloud wiki.

The current MediaWiki and Wikibase release is actually 1.43, so wikibase.cloud (and 91% of the ecosystem by site) is currently 4 versions behind.

Excluding 1.39.7, the next most installed version is 1.39.11 with 8 sites, notably these are 4 security releases ahead of the cloud sites.

Continuing to exclude wikibase.cloud by excluding 1.39.7, and deciding to ignore the different security releases, we can see 1.39 (the previous LTS version) is on 35% of “other” wikibases.

This is followed by 1.35 which is on 15% of these “other” wikibases (though this is only 10 sites).

So, 50% of non wikibases.cloud wikibases are on the LTS version of MediaWiki and/or Wikibase (33 sites).

Wikibase suite?

I have always been interested in trying to figure out how many people actually use “wikibase suite” as it is currently peddled by Wikimedia Deutschland, rather than installing Wikibase from source (the old-fashioned and arguably less complicated way). And as mentioned above, “host” on wikibase.world really doesn’t reflect how a site is actually installed.

Using the data on wikibase.world for version information that is extracted from the MediaWiki version information (summarized in this query) what was processed for 777 sites in my notebook for this post, we see.

In my data set, there are currently 37 different installed versions on wikibase sites, that looks something like this: 1.27.0-rc.1, 1.28.2, 1.32.5, 1.33.0, 1.34.1, 1.34.2, 1.34.4, 1.35.1, 1.35.2, 1.35.3, 1.35.4, 1.35.5, 1.35.7, 1.36.1, 1.37.0-alpha, 1.38.5, 1.39.1, 1.39.10, 1.39.11, 1.39.2, 1.39.3, 1.39.4, 1.39.5, 1.39.6, 1.39.7, 1.40.0-wmf.26, 1.40.1, 1.41.0, 1.41.1, 1.41.4, 1.42.1, 1.42.3, 1.42.4, 1.43.0, 1.43.0-wmf.7, 1.44.0-wmf.15, 1.44.0-wmf.16

We can also use a little API call, and a bit of code to come up with a similar list of released docker images as part of the “wikibase suite” release system.

curl -L -s 'https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/wikibase/wikibase/tags?page_size=1024'|jq '."results"[]["name"]'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

And once throwing this through a little bit of data processing, we can come up with a similar list of versions that have been released as part of the “wikibase suite” release system: 1.29.0, 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.32.0, 1.33.0, 1.34.0, 1.35.0, 1.35.2, 1.35.4, 1.35.5, 1.35.7, 1.36.3, 1.36.4, 1.37.6, 1.38.5, 1.38.7, 1.39.1, 1.39.10, 1.39.5, 1.39.6, 1.39.7, 1.39.8, 1.40.1, 1.40.2, 1.40.3, 1.41.0, 1.41.1, 1.41.2, 1.42.1, 1.42.3

If we link these two lists of installed versions, and versions that can be installed using suite, we get a table showing the potential installs that are making use of the current suite installation method (with a few rcs etc trimmed out)

Version	Installed	Suitable	Overlap	Installations
1.28.2	✅			1
1.29.0		✅
1.30.0		✅
1.31.0		✅
1.32.0		✅
1.32.5	✅			1
1.33.0	✅	✅	✅	1
1.34.0		✅
1.34.1	✅			1
1.34.2	✅			1
1.34.4	✅			1
1.35.0		✅
1.35.1	✅			2
1.35.2	✅	✅	✅	3
1.35.3	✅			1
1.35.4	✅	✅	✅	1
1.35.5	✅	✅	✅	2
1.35.7	✅	✅	✅	1
1.36.1	✅			1
1.36.3		✅
1.36.4		✅
1.37.6		✅
1.38.5	✅	✅	✅	6
1.38.7		✅
1.39.1	✅	✅	✅	5
1.39.10	✅	✅	✅	2
1.39.11	✅			8
1.39.2	✅			1
1.39.3	✅			1
1.39.4	✅			3
1.39.5	✅	✅	✅	2
1.39.6	✅	✅	✅	1
1.39.7	✅	✅	✅	712 (711 cloud)
1.39.8		✅
1.40.1	✅	✅	✅	1
1.40.2		✅
1.40.3		✅
1.41.0	✅	✅	✅	1
1.41.1	✅	✅	✅	2
1.41.2		✅
1.41.4	✅			1
1.42.1	✅	✅	✅	3
1.42.3	✅	✅	✅	1
1.42.4	✅			1
1.43.0	✅			2

Summarizing the data, and excluding the wikibase.cloud installations.

• Wikibase Cloud instances: 711
• Other wikibases on versions that can be installed using suite: 33
• Other wikibases on versions that can NOT be installed using suite: 33

So 50% of these “other” checked wikibases can certainly not be making use of “suite”. And of the 33 sites that might possibly be using “suite” as they are on the same version at least, probably 50% are installed via other means, so the “suite” installations probably account for ~16 of the wikibases in wikibase.world at a guesstimate, with ~50 using other methods and 711 using wikibase.cloud.

Though there is no way to tell for sure.

An element of time

Both this and my last post show the wikibase ecosystem as a simple snapshot in time, and really the interesting thing would be to check in throughout time, seeing how the ecosystem hopefully continues to expand, become more active, and become more connected.

This entire post revolves around an IPython notebook (with a few extras at the end) that started off by ingesting all items in Wikibase.world from a simple XML export from Special:Export (which I have archived on archive.org).

With any luck, in the future I’ll be able to start running the same data producing code over a variety of these XML snapshots and start to show the ecosystem evolving. But that is for a future post!

If you do notice anything slightly off, or think of anything else that could be added, let me know. Go an get involved in wikibase.world, and “click that subscibe button” 😂 if you don’t want to miss the next post 😉.

Edits

I’ll try and keep a record of edits and things that have been identified relating to this post here…

• 5 seconds before posting: It turns out that I didn’t include the “wikibase-docker” host very well in the notebook, which lead to wikibase.imfd.cl not being represented very well throughout. Now fixed in the notebook, and it does pop up a little in the updated web.

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