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Wikidata:Introduction

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Wikidata is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation: a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other Wikimedia projects, and well beyond that.

What does this mean?

Let's look at the opening statement in more detail:

  • Free. The data in Wikidata is published under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0, allowing the reuse of the data in many different scenarios. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the data, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
  • Collaborative. The data in Wikidata is entered and maintained by Wikidata editors, who decide on the rules of content creation and management in Wikidata. Bots do also enter data in Wikidata.
  • Multilingual. Editing, consuming, browsing, and reusing the data is fully multilingual. Data entered in any language is immediately available in all other languages; editing in any language is possible and encouraged.
  • A secondary database. Wikidata can record not just statements, but also their sources, thus reflecting the diversity of knowledge available and supporting the notion of verifiability.
  • Collecting structured data. Unlike Wikimedia Commons, which collects media files, and the Wikipedias, which produce encyclopedic articles, Wikidata will collect data, in a structured form. This will allow easy reuse of that data by Wikimedia projects and third parties, and will enable computers to easily process and “understand” it.
  • Support for Wikimedia projects. Wikidata supports Wikipedia with more easily maintainable language links and infoboxes, thus reducing the workload in Wikipedia and increasing its quality. Improvements or updates in one language are available in all other languages.
  • Support well beyond that. Everyone can use Wikidata for a huge number of different services.

How does Wikidata work?

This diagram shows you the most important terms you will hear around Wikidata.

This wiki is the Wikidata repository. The repository is the central storage for the data that may be accessed by the client Wikis connected to the repository. By maintaining the data in the repository, content loaded dynamically from Wikidata does not need to be translated nor have to be kept up to date in each individual client Wiki. In addition, Wikidata has centralized all Wikipedia interlanguage links.

The Wikidata repository

Items and their data are interconnected.

The Wikidata repository consists mainly of items, each outlined by a label, a description and likely one or more aliases. Sitelinks connect each item to corresponding articles on all client wikis. Statements describe detailed characteristics of each Item. Each statement consists of a property and a value. You can give mountain peaks, places, and buildings geographic coordinates. You can link a person to his or her place of birth, occupation, or to its number of an authority control database; link a politician to his or her political party; link an item about a township to its next higher administrative unit; link a country to its highest representative and its national anthem; and so on. All this information can be displayed in any language, even if the data originated in a different language. When accessing these values client wikis will show the most up-to-date data.

Accessing the data

In pages on client Wikis you can access data using a Lua Scribunto interface. You can retrieve all data independently using the Wikidata API.

There is more to come

Wikidata is an ongoing project that is under active development. More data types as well as queries will be available in the future. You can find more information about Wikidata and its ongoing development on the Wikidata page on Meta. Subscribe to the the Wikidata mailing list to receive up-to-date information about the development and to participate in discussions about the future of the project.

How can I contribute?

Go ahead and start editing. Editing is the best way to learn about the structure and concepts of Wikidata. If you would like to gain understanding of Wikidata's concepts upfront, you may want to have a look at the help pages. If you have questions, please feel free to drop them in the project chat or contact the development team.

Where to get started

Some links to get started:

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