Professional Wiki
MUDCon Spring 2026

Introducing
NeoWiki

Modern Structured Data for MediaWiki

Jeroen De Dauw & Bernhard Krabina MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference

Time for Something New

  • SMW is powerful and unique, has issues
  • Usability of Notion, Airtable, etc
  • SMW 20 years old, Wikibase ~15
  • Many lessons learned
Open-source structured data

NeoWiki

10x better
Usability
10x better
Sustainability
Philosophy
Focus on value, not features

Developed by

Professional Wiki

Backed by

ECHOLOT
EU Cultural Heritage Consortium
Hallo Welt!
Creators of BlueSpice

Demo

neowiki.dev
ECHOLOT

European Cultural Heritage: Optimized Linked Open Tools

Mission

Creation, reuse, and dissemination of high-quality, semantically rich cultural heritage data accessible to scholars and institutions of any size.

Technology

Built on knowledge graphs and open-source software (MediaWiki suite) for FAIR data principles and integration with Europeana, DS4CH, and Wikidata.

EU Funded by the European Union

Core ECHOLOT System

Base technology
MediaWiki
  • Ready-made collaborative curation UI
  • Extensive library of extensions
  • Dedicated developer community
Focus: addressing limitations for cultural heritage, especially structured data and access rights.
Built on top
Hybrid Curation
  • Import, export & transformation
  • Data reconciliation
  • Entity linking & enrichment
  • Image recognition & annotation
  • Data quality checks

Case Studies & Partners

Basque Cultural Heritage Data
European Literary Bibliography
Connecting Media Arts Collections
Flemish Fine & Performing Arts
Publishing & Roundtripping GLAM Data

Participating institutions

  • ZKM (DE)
  • LI-MA (NL)
  • Grey Area (CR)
  • Computer History Museum (SI)
  • Rhizome (US)
  • Zentrum für Netzkunst (DE)
  • National Library of Czech Republic
  • British Library (UK)
  • Wikimedia Sweden
  • KMSKA (BE)
  • M Leuven (BE)
  • MSK Gent (BE)
  • Musea Brugge (BE)
  • Mu.ZEE (BE)
  • Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (BE)
  • De Munt (BE)
  • Fundación Sancho el Sabio (ES)
  • Tabakalera MediaLab (ES)
  • Musée Basque Bayonne (FR)
  • UEU / INGUMA (ES)
  • University of Alicante (ES)

Consortium Partners

15 partners across 11 countries

  • Professional Wiki GmbH (DE)
  • Knowledge Management Associates (AT)
  • TIB (DE) — Coordinator
  • Europeana Foundation (NL)
  • DARIAH-EU (FR)
  • Austrian Academy of Sciences (AT)
  • Czech Academy of Sciences (CZ)
  • Polish Academy of Sciences (PL)
  • Jozef Stefan Institute (SI)
  • University of the Basque Country (ES)
  • University of Helsinki (FI)
  • PCSS (PL)
  • meemoo (BE)
  • Australo (EE)
  • takin.solutions (BG)

Follow ECHOLOT

echolot-eccch.eu

ECHOLOT Project @ECHOLOT_Project @ECHOLOTProject

NeoWiki for BlueSpice

  • NeoWiki powers BlueSpice Galaxy
  • Hallo Welt funds NeoWiki
  • Active collaboration

NeoWiki Product Vision

  • 10x Improvement
    Radically better UX and sustainability
  • Coherent product
    Professional Wiki is product owner
  • Open source
    Build your own extensions on top
  • Designed for AI
    APIs, well-documented formats, built-in AI capabilities

NeoWiki vs Semantic MediaWiki SMW

Native schemas
Types, constraints, and defaults
Native form-based editing
Derived from schemas
Multiple subjects per page
As a native concept
JSON storage
In revision slots
Standard graph DB
And query language
Modern codebase
Full test coverage

NeoWiki vs Wikibase Wikibase

Display UIs
Native schemas
Forms
Property graph model
QLever  Blazegraph
Inline queries

NeoWiki vs Bucket

Bucket
  • Similar philosophy: serve common cases, keep code lean
  • Designed for the gaming wiki use cases
  • Optimized for power users who write Lua and SQL
NeoWiki
  • High-UX views and forms
  • Schemas with validation
  • Graph database and queries

Get Involved

neowiki.dev (demo wiki)

github.com/ProfessionalWiki/NeoWiki

@NeoWiki

@neowiki.bsky.social

@NeoWikiAI

Professional Wiki

professional.wiki Professional Wiki @ProWiki @ProWikis

Q&A