A Glimpse into Babel: An Analysis of Multilinguality in Wikidata

Multilinguality is an important topic for knowledge bases, especially Wikidata, that was build to serve the multilingual requirements of an international community. Its labels are the way for humans to interact with the data. In this paper, we explore the state of languages in Wikidata as of now, especially in regard to its ontology, and the relationship to Wikipedia. Furthermore, we set the multilinguality of Wikidata in the context of the real world by comparing it to the distribution of native speakers. We find an existing language maldistribution, which is less urgent in the ontology, and promising results for future improvements.