On Tuesday, 29 October, Wikidata turns twelve, and I had been thinking about creating a small birthday gift to celebrate. Earlier, I had experimented with creating an animated background to use in our Editing Wikidata live streams, but never got one that worked well. But the thought popped up again, and perhaps I could do something different.

As it were, another thought I had also been pondering was how to do a refresh on the older web slides I used to present and if I could use the animated background I have on aina.li. Two thoughts turned into one, and I made an animated Wikidata background for the web.

As a demo, I deployed it to GitHub pages, to show it in full use, but the real treat is in the code for anyone to reuse.

Yes, it is a bit silly, and not hugely useful for the sum of human knowledge, but a celebration has to be a bit fun too. So happy 12th birthday Wikidata, I hope you enjoy all your gifts.