We study discussions in Wikidata, the world’s largest open-source collaborative knowledge graph (KG). This is important because it helps KG community managers understand how discussions are used and inform the design of collaborative practices and support tools. We follow a mixed-methods approach with descriptive statistics, thematic analysis, and statistical tests to investigate how much discussions in Wikidata are used, what they are used for, and how they support knowledge engineering (KE) activities. The study covers three core sources of discussion, the talk pages that accompany Wikidata items and properties, and a general-purpose communication page. Our findings show low use of discussion capabilities and a power-law distribution similar to other KE projects such as Schema.org. When discussions are used, they are mostly about KE activities, including activities that span across the entire KE lifecycle from conceptualisation and implementation to maintenance and taxonomy building. We hope that the findings will help Wikidata devise improved practices and capabilities to encourage the use of discussions as a tool to collaborate, improve editor engagement, and engineer better KGs.

我们研究讨论维基数据是世界上最大的开源协作知识图（KG）。这很重要，因为它可以帮助 KG 社区管理者了解如何使用讨论并为协作实践和支持工具的设计提供信息。我们采用描述性统计、主题分析和统计测试的混合方法来调查维基数据中讨论的使用量、它们的用途以及它们如何支持知识工程（KE）活动。该研究涵盖了三个核心讨论来源、维基数据项目和属性附带的讨论页面以及通用通信页面。我们的研究结果表明，与 Schema.org 等其他 KE 项目类似，讨论功能和幂律分布的使用率较低。使用讨论时，大多是关于KE活动，包括跨越整个 KE 生命周期的活动，从概念化和实施到维护和分类法构建。我们希望这些发现将帮助维基数据设计改进的实践和能力，以鼓励使用讨论作为协作工具、提高编辑参与度和设计更好的知识图谱。