Users of Event Data will have noticed several issues over the past few months:
- Wordpress events have not been processing correctly and are no longer being collected.
- There have been significant issues with the Wikipedia agent, leading to missing events, and currently no new events are being collected.
- The API has been unreliable and frequently unavailable.
The Event Data API is not a fully supported production service and we have not had sufficient resources to resolve these issues. We have tried implementing several solutions but they haven’t proved effective enough to keep the service running reliably. (To get a flavour of what we have been working on, see this blog post).
We are intending to wind down the service later in the year and will not be investing additional resources into supporting Event Data. As a result, we will be building a new endpoint to focus on what we consider the most important function of Event Data: supporting the delivery of data citations. While also a beta service, we expect to be able to deliver a more stable API with a smaller dataset. We don’t yet have a launch data for the new service, or a date when Event Data will be closed down. We will post here when we have more to share about the future of Event Data and data citations.