Wikidata is a
collaboratively edited multilingual
knowledge graph hosted by the
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
. It is a common source of
open data
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements ...
that Wikimedia projects such as
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
,
and anyone else, can use under the
CC0 public domain
The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired ...
license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for Media ...
, and is also powered by the set of knowledge graph MediaWiki extensions known as
Wikibase.
Concept
Wikidata is a
document-oriented database, focused on items, which represent any kind of topic, concept, or object. Each item is allocated a unique,
persistent identifier, a positive integer prefixed with the upper-case letter Q, known as a "QID". This enables the basic information required to identify the topic that the item covers to be translated without favouring any language.
Examples of items include , , , , and .
Item labels need not 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 unique identifier (''QID'') is therefore linked to this combination.
Main parts
Fundamentally, an item consists of:
* Obligatorily, an
identifier
An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical noncountable ...
(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
Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie ( , , ; born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the fir ...
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 "as of 2011". 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
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
, a
lexeme is a unit of
lexical meaning. Similarly, Wikidata's ''lexemes'' are items with a structure that makes them more suitable to store
lexicographical data. Besides storing the language to which the lexeme refers, they have a section for ''forms'' and a section for ''senses''.
EntitySchemas
In January 2019 development started of a new extension for MediaWiki to enable storing
Shape Expressions in a separate namespace.
This extension has since been installed on Wikidata and enables contributors to use
Shape Expressions 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.
Development
The creation of the project was funded by donations from the
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and
Google, Inc., totaling
€
The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists o ...
1.3 million. The development of the project is mainly driven by
Wikimedia Deutschland under the management of
Lydia Pintscher
Lydia ( Lydian: 𐤮𐤱𐤠𐤭𐤣𐤠, ''Śfarda''; Aramaic: ''Lydia''; el, Λυδία, ''Lȳdíā''; tr, Lidya) was an Iron Age kingdom of western Asia Minor located generally east of ancient Ionia in the modern western Turkish pr ...
, 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
An infobox is a digital or physical table used to collect and present a subset of information about its subject, such as a document. It is a structured document containing a set of attribute–value pairs, and in Wikipedia represents a summa ...
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](_blank)
() 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
The Hungarian Wikipedia ( hu, Magyar Wikipédia) is the Hungarian/Magyar version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Started on 8 July 2003, this version reached the 300,000-article milestone in May 2015. became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was extended to the
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
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 type
In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most progra ...
s (such as
coordinates
In geometry, a coordinate system is a system that uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of the points or other geometric elements on a manifold such as Euclidean space. The order of the coordinates is sig ...
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
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
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
A triplestore or RDF store is a purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of triples through semantic queries. A triple is a data entity composed of subject–predicate–object, like "Bob is 35" or "Bob knows Fred".
Much like a rel ...
and
graph database.
Logo
The bars on the
logo
A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
contain the word "WIKI" encoded in
Morse code
Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one ...
. 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
Wikiquote
Wikiquote is part of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation using MediaWiki software. Based on an idea by Daniel Alston and implemented by Brion Vibber, the project's objective is to produce collaboratively a vast refer ...
s', 32% of all
Wikisources', and 27% of Wikimedia Commons's. Usage in other
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...
projects is a testimonial.
, Wikidata's data was visualized by at least 20 other external tools and over 300 papers have been published about Wikidata.
Wikidata's structured dataset has been used by
virtual assistant
An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term " chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtua ...
s such as Apple's
Siri and
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio ...
.
Applications
* Mwnci extension can import data from Wikidata to
LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ...
s
* There are (at October 2019) discussions about using QID items in relation to what is being called QID emoji
* Wiki Explorer – Android application to discover things around you and micro editing Wikidata
* KDE Itinerary – a privacy conscious open source travel assistant that uses data from Wikidata
*
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
originally started a frame semantic
parser project that aims to parse the information on
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
and transfer it into Wikidata by coming up with relevant statements using
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
.
A systematic literature review of the uses of Wikidata in research was carried in 2019.
See also
*
Abstract Wikipedia
*
BabelNet
*
DBpedia
*
Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic search ...
*
Wikibase
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
WikidataConon ''media.ccc.de''
{{Authority control
Knowledge graphs
Online databases
Wikimedia projects
Lexical databases
Advertising-free websites
Creative Commons-licensed websites
Internet properties established in 2012
Articles containing video clips
Open data
Community websites