I have had the pleasure of being part of the Wikibase journey one way or another since 2013 when I first joined Wikimedia Germany to work on Wikidata. That long-running relation to the project should put me in a fairly good position to give a high-level overview of the history, from both a technical and higher-level perspective. So here it goes.
For those that don’t know Wikibase is code that powers wikidata.org, and a growing number of other sites. If you want to know more read about it on Wikipedia, or the Wikibase website.
For this reason, a lot of the early timeline is quite heavy on the Wikidata side. There are certainly some key points missing, if you think they are worthy of mentioning then leave a comment or reach out!