Members of the digital preservation community collate and cap-ture metadata to describe file formats, software, operating systemsand hardware, and use it to inform and drive digital preservationprocesses. In this work we describe how the infrastructure ofWikidata meets the requirements for a technical registry of meta-data related to computer software and computing environments.Collaboratively creating this metadata, and making it available aslinked open data, will reduce the amount of redundant work digitalpreservation professionals do in order to describe resources. Hav-ing machine-readable, linked open data that describes the digitalpreservation domain will also allow us to reuse this data in our soft-ware applications and information systems, reducing the overheadwhen building new tools. Furthermore the Wikidata social andtechnical infrastructure will enable the long term continued accessto the data digital preservation practitioners collate and capture.Wikidata is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), andis created through commons-based peer production [3]. Simplyput, Wikidata is a knowledge base of structured data that anyonecan edit [40]. The infrastructure of Wikidata is created using freesoftware, and is designated to the public domain. All content inWikidata is licensed so that other may freely reuse the data. Vol-unteer editors, coordinating their own work, add data to Wikidata.Through this analysis we demonstrate how the infrastructure ofWikidata provides distinct advantages to the cultural heritage do-main that proprietary knowledge bases do not provide.

iPRES, Kyoto

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