Wikidata

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, are able to use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software MediaWiki, including its extension for semi-structured data, the Wikibase. As of early 2025, Wikidata had 1.65 billion item statements ( semantic triples).

Concept

Wikidata is a document-oriented database, focusing on ''items'', which represent any kind of topic, concept, or object. Each item is allocated a unique persistent identifier called its ''QID'', a positive integer prefixed with the upper-case letter "Q". This makes it possible to provide translations of the basic information describing the topic each item covers without favouring any particular language.

Some examples of items and their QIDs are , , , , and .

Item ''labels'' do not need to be unique. For example, there are two items named "Elvis Presley": , which represents the American singer and actor, and , which represents his self-titled album. However, the combination of a label and its ''description'' must be unique. To avoid ambiguity, an item's QID is hence linked to this combination.

Main parts

Fundamentally, an item consists of:

* An identifier (the QID), related to a label and a description.
* Optionally, multiple aliases and some number of statements (and their properties and values).

Statements

''Statements'' are how any information known about an item is recorded in Wikidata. Formally, they consist of key–value pairs, which match a ''property'' (such as "author", or "publication date") with one or more entity ''values'' (such as " Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "1902"). For example, the informal English statement "milk is white" would be encoded by a statement pairing the property with the value under the item .

Statements may map a property to more than one value. For example, the "occupation" property for Marie Curie could be linked with the values "physicist" and "chemist", to reflect the fact that she engaged in both occupations.

Values may take on many types including other Wikidata items, strings, numbers, or media files. Properties prescribe what types of values they may be paired with. For example, the property may only be paired with values of type "URL".

Optionally, ''qualifiers'' can be used to refine the meaning of a statement by providing additional information. For example, a "population" statement could be modified with a qualifier such as "point in time (P585): 2011" (as its own key-value pair). Values in the statements may also be annotated with ''references'', pointing to a source backing up the statement's content. As with statements, all qualifiers and references are property–value pairs.

Properties

Each property has a numeric identifier prefixed with a capital P and a page on Wikidata with optional label, description, aliases, and statements. As such, there are properties with the sole purpose of describing other properties, such as .

Properties may also define more complex rules about their intended usage, termed ''constraints''. For example, the property includes a "single value constraint", reflecting the reality that (typically) territories have only one capital city. Constraints are treated as testing alerts and hints, rather than inviolable rules.

Before a new property is created, it needs to undergo a discussion process.

The most used property is , which is used on more than item pages

Lexemes

In linguistics, a lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning representing a group of words that share the same core meaning and grammatical characteristics. Similarly, Wikidata's ''lexemes'' are items with a structure that makes them more suitable to store lexicographical data. Since 2016, Wikidata has supported lexicographical entries in the form of lexemes.

In Wikidata, lexicographical entries have a different identifier from regular item entries. These entries are prefixed with the letter L, such as in the example entries for book and cow. Lexicographical entries in Wikidata can contain statements, senses, and forms. The use of lexicographical entries in Wikidata allows for the documentation of word usage, the connection between words and items on Wikidata, word translations, and enables machine-readable lexicographical data.

In 2020, lexicographical entries on Wikidata exceeded 250,000. The language with the most lexicographical entries was Russian, with a total of 101,137 lexemes, followed by English with 38,122 lexemes. There are over 668 languages with lexicographical entries on Wikidata.

Entity schemas

In Wikidata, a schema is a data model that outlines the necessary attributes for a data item. For instance, a data item that uses the attribute " instance of" with the value "human" would typically include attributes such as " place of birth," "date of birth," "date of death," and " place of death." The entity schema in Wikidata utilizes Shape Expression (ShEx) to describe the data in Wikidata items in the form of a Resource Description Framework (RDF). The use of entity schemas in Wikidata helps address data inconsistencies and unchecked vandalism.

In January 2019, development started of a new extension for MediaWiki to enable storing ShEx in a separate namespace. Entity schemas are stored with different identifiers than those used for items, properties, and lexemes. Entity schemas are stored with an "E" identifier, such as E10 for the entity schema of human data instances and E270 for the entity schema of building data instances. This extension has since been installed on Wikidata and enables contributors to use ShEx for validating and describing Resource Description Framework data in items and lexemes. Any item or lexeme on Wikidata can be validated against an entity schema, and this makes it an important tool for quality assurance.

Content

Wikidata's content collections include data for biographies, medicine, digital humanities, scholarly metadata through the WikiCite project.

It includes data collections from other open projects including Freebase (database).

Development

The creation of the project was funded by donations from the Allen Institute for AI, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc., totaling €1.3 million. The development of the project is mainly driven by Wikimedia Deutschland under the management of Lydia Pintscher, and was originally split into three phases:
# Centralising interlanguage links – links between Wikipedia articles about the same topic in different languages.
# Providing a central place for infobox data for all Wikipedias.
# Creating and updating list articles based on data in Wikidata and linking to other Wikimedia sister projects, including Meta-Wiki and the own Wikidata (interwikilinks).

Initial rollout

Wikidata was launched on 29 October 2012 and was the first new project of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006.Wikidata
() At this time, only the centralization of language links was available. This enabled items to be created and filled with basic information: a label – a name or title, aliases – alternative terms for the label, a description, and links to articles about the topic in all the various language editions of Wikipedia (interwikipedia links).

Historically, a Wikipedia article would include a list of interlanguage links (links to articles on the same topic in other editions of Wikipedia, if they existed). Wikidata was originally a self-contained repository of interlanguage links. Wikipedia language editions were still not able to access Wikidata, so they needed to continue to maintain their own lists of interlanguage links.

On 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was extended to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias on 30 January, to the English Wikipedia on 13 February and to all other Wikipedias on 6 March. After no consensus was reached over a proposal to restrict the removal of language links from the English Wikipedia, they were automatically removed by bots. On 23 September 2013, interlanguage links went live on Wikimedia Commons.

Statements and data access

On 4 February 2013, statements were introduced to Wikidata entries. The possible values for properties were initially limited to two data types (items and images on Wikimedia Commons), with more data types (such as coordinates and dates) to follow later. The first new type, string, was deployed on 6 March.

The ability for the various language editions of Wikipedia to access data from Wikidata was rolled out progressively between 27 March and 25 April 2013. On 16 September 2015, Wikidata began allowing so-called ''arbitrary access'', or access from a given article of a Wikipedia to the statements on Wikidata items not directly connected to it. For example, it became possible to read data about Germany from the Berlin article, which was not feasible before. On 27 April 2016, arbitrary access was activated on Wikimedia Commons.

According to a 2020 study, a large proportion of the data on Wikidata consists of entries imported en masse from other databases by Internet bots, which helps to "break down the walls" of data silos.

Query service and other improvements

On 7 September 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the release of the Wikidata Query Service, which lets users run queries on the data contained in Wikidata. The service uses SPARQL as the query language. As of November 2018, there are at least 26 different tools that allow querying the data in different ways. It uses Blazegraph as its triplestore and graph database.

In 2021, Wikimedia Deutschland released the Query Builder, "a form-based query builder to allow people who don't know how to use SPARQL" to write a query.

Logo

The bars on the logo contain the word "WIKI" encoded in Morse code. It was created by Arun Ganesh and selected through community decision.

Reception

In November 2014, Wikidata received the Open Data Publisher Award from the Open Data Institute "for sheer scale, and built-in openness".

In December 2014, Google announced that it would shut down Freebase in favor of Wikidata.

, Wikidata information was used in 58.4% of all English Wikipedia articles, mostly for external identifiers or coordinate locations. In aggregate, data from Wikidata is shown in 64% of all Wikipedias' pages, 93% of all Wikivoyage articles, 34% of all Wikiquotes', 32% of all Wikisources', and 27% of Wikimedia Commons.

, Wikidata's data was visualized by at least 20 other external tools and over 300 papers have been published about Wikidata.

Applications

* Wikidata's structured dataset has been used by virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa.
* Mwnci extension can import data from Wikidata to LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets
* KDE Itinerary – a privacy conscious open source travel assistant that uses data from Wikidata
* Google originally started a frame semantic parser project that aims to parse the information on Wikipedia and transfer it into Wikidata by coming up with relevant statements using artificial intelligence.
* MathQA – a mathematical question answering system

A systematic literature review of the uses of Wikidata in research was carried out in 2019.

See also

* Abstract Wikipedia
* BabelNet
* DBpedia
* Semantic MediaWiki
* Wikibase
* Wikimedia Enterprise

Notes

References

Further reading

*
* Claudia Müller-Birn, Benjamin Karran, Janette Lehmann, Markus Luczak-Rösch:
Peer-production system or collaborative ontology development effort: What is Wikidata?
' In, OpenSym 2015 – Conference on Open Collaboration, San Francisco, US, 19 – 21 Aug 2015 (preprint).

External links

*
* Videos
WikidataCon
on ''media.ccc.de''

Wikidata Query Builder

{{Authority control

Knowledge graphs
Wikimedia projects
Lexical databases
Online databases
Community websites
Creative Commons-licensed websites
Open data
Internet properties established in 2012
Articles containing video clips