Happy 13th Birthday, Wikidata!

Facts don’t stand alone; they connect, forming the web of knowledge that shapes how we understand the world.

Thirteen years ago, Wikidata was created to store and link those facts across Wikipedia and its sister projects, helping us preserve and understand the past in new, connected ways.

Each entry holds a trace of human craft, of history shaped by hand and place. When connected, they form a living network of heritage, from blacksmiths’ workshops and binding stones to the people who recorded, restored, and re-mapped them. As a free, open knowledge base, Wikidata stores structured data that keeps infoboxes up to date and powers complex queries from finding artists born in a specific century to ranking countries by population. Its data is machine-readable, freely licensed, and interconnected with other open datasets, fueling research, apps, and AI.

Explore Wikidata here. 

Behind it all are dedicated volunteers who merge duplicates, add sources, and weave connections across Wikimedia projects. As Wikidata turns 13, we celebrate everyone who keeps it thriving and invite you to explore, contribute, and help expand this remarkable network of knowledge. To celebrate we are spotlighting the work of Wikimedian Anne-Karoline Distel who has been using Wikimedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap to collect and share information about historical forges in Ireland.

Forges and Tyring Platforms on Wikimedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap

Some time ago, I made a video about forges and how to map them on OpenStreetMap which you can find on Youtube. I used an example in County Kilkenny, like I usually do, which is a recorded forge on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) – a smithy in the townland of Kilfane Demesne built by the Power family of Kilfane who were heavily involved in the Kilkenny hunt, so a smithy at the crossroads must have been considered handy.

Recently then, I bought Deirdre O’Neill’s excellent book “Remnants of Our Past” for which she used some of my research, one of which being an oral history interview about holy wells I had uploaded to Wikimedia. But I already digress. Amongst many other interesting topics relating to Irish folklore and history, she has a chapter about forges in which she mentions “binding stones”. In other parts of the world (including parts of Ireland), they are known as banding stones, shoeing stones and tyring platforms. They were large circular platforms, often made from reused millstones, which were used by blacksmiths (or wheelwrights, but that was often the same person or at least in the same family in Ireland) for putting the heated iron rim on the wooden cart wheel which was resting with the hub in the centre hole of the binding stone.

When I saw her explanation, I remembered two sites in County Kilkenny (or so I thought, turns out, I misremembered one) which had surviving binding stones. I created a Wikidata entry for binding stone with images and links to the Schools’ Collection, because they are mentioned there a few times. I later had to merge it with an already existing Wikidata item, when I found out that there was already one for “Tyring platform” which might be more of a British term.

I then made a video about how to map the binding stones on OpenStreetMap including the example in County Kilkenny which I had remembered correctly. Luckily, there was also information about that blacksmith and a mention of the binding stone in the Schools’ Collection, and I found the family in the 1901 and 1911 census which hopefully makes for a more personal story about the site. By pure chance, I had also photographed a fieldgate with the name of the blacksmith on a short hike last year and uploaded it to Wikimedia.

I also found a photograph with the binding stone from Deirdre’s book at Parke’s Castle in Leitrim on Wikimedia and was thus able to map it on OpenStreetMap. I would appreciate a photo of it from closer up, but I might get a chance to visit Parke’s Castle myself in November, fingers crossed. That one actually has a wooden wheel on top to demonstrate the use. It is however doubtful that it will last very long being exposed to the Irish weather.

After that, I took it upon me to create Wikidata entries for all the smithies/ forges recorded on the NIAH as forges and assign them WikiLovesMonuments numbers, in the hope that we will have a better record of them in the future. There are actually shockingly few forges recorded on the NIAH, especially in counties associated with horses like Tipperary or with the 1798 rebellion like Wexford (blacksmiths provided the pikes) – none in fact in either county. 

As one of the possible “has parts (P527)” properties, I created “horseshoe shaped entrance” (Q136544057), so you can filter by the forges who have those entrances in Ireland now. Of course, I could not use the NIAH photos as a source, because they are not OpenData, so I could only add the property, where I had OpenData sources like Bing StreetSide imagery which we can use on OpenStreetMap, or other OpenData street-level imagery or Wikimedia. There are however only 48 forges recorded by the NIAH (on the Historic Environment Viewer – and one is already demolished) and a quick click on the entry will show you the image and you can see whether they have horseshoe shaped entrances or not and you can visit the site and take photographs for Wikimedia then. The NIAH search results on the Historic Environment Viewer are also not shareable, you can only export the file. (I cannot get their advanced search on buildingsofireland.ie to work, but if you type in “forge” into the simple search, you get buildings called “forge” AND “forges/ smithies”. Some forges are also to be categorised as “house”, and the information about the attached forge is hidden in the text.)

Horseshoe Forge, Blacksmith Workshop – Enniskerry, Wicklow
L’Estrange, Robert Augustus Henry, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A few forges are mapped on OpenStreetMap now which I have extracted (as remote data, so it automatically gets updated) into a uMap. This uMap also shows the tyring platforms (that’s the term I had to go with on OSM, because it has to be British English – see the OSM wiki) and the horseshoe shaped entrances of forges which are quite numerous and photogenic. Some of the forges on that map I had found searching for “binding stone” and “shoeing stone” in the Schools’ Collection and comparing to old Ordnance Survey maps which are available as OpenData via scans by the National Library of Scotland.

I can’t imagine that many more binding stones survive, because they were usually outside the forge near the road and have fallen victim to road widening and modernisation, but maybe there are still a few out there to be found and recorded. Unfortunately, they are not protected monuments, but we could all help to raise awareness and save the last few, if possible. I’ve sent a link to my video to my local heritage officer who is very supportive, but it will probably take more than two passionate people to make a difference.

Happy hunting!