Sometimes I think back about how Scholia started, and then I think I remember a Twitter discussion. Twitter was a social platform that was unable to fight hate speech. I left it last year in favor of Mastodon.

Anyway, I did some digging today and found this thread from October 8-9 2016. A few days earlier, Finn has created a profile based on data in Wikidata on his homepage, which I was very happy about. You can see how Dario suggests to put that webpage up on Toolforge. For completeness, this is the first commit, October 9.

This chat was after @fnielsen’s blog post about the idea of the needed open infrastructure and a possible Wikidata solution from September 2016. Finally, it was also only half a year before Scholia got mentioned in Nature.

BTW, at the time there still was a focus on bibliographic information. We learned since that the Wikidata platform cannot technically meet the needs, at least not at this moment. Instead, the focus is now much more about the literature that supports the knowledge in Wikidata and Wikipedia and make that as interoperable as possible.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2023/01/scholia-timeline.html.