User:Chidoelrey/sandbox
| User sandbox page |
| This is my sandbox. I'm using it to document what I'm learning about Wikidata and to get used to MediaWiki-style formatting at the same time. I'm new here, so if this isn't the appropriate place to do this, please let me know! |
Software edit
Wikidata is built on the MediaWiki wiki package. More specifically, it uses Wikibase, an extension to MediaWiki for creating, managing and sharing structured data.
A bigger picture edit
There are many project names with wiki in them, but what about a wiki itself? It's simply a type of website that lets users edit pages within the browser. A wiki uses version control for each editable page.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that operates a bunch of wiki-related projects.
The most fundamental of these projects is MediaWiki, an open-source software engine for building wikis. Since most of Wikimedia Foundation's projects are wikis, they're powered by MediaWiki, but individual projects may use other software components more specific to their needs. Since MediaWiki is open-source, anyone is free to use it, even if they're completely unaffiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Some of the most commonly used wikis run by the Wikimedia Foundation include Wikipedia ("the free encyclopedia"), Wiktionary ("the free dictionary"), and Wikiquote ("the free quote compendium"). The servers for these wikis are all powered by MediaWiki.
There's plenty of overlap with all these wikis, so Meta-Wiki is there to serve as a common community site. It's not really a distinct community, but a "community of communities"; a place for collaboration between the individual Wikimedia projects.
Which brings us to Wikidata. Let's selectively quote the Wikidata Introduction:
Wikidata is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation: a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for [...] Wikimedia projects and well beyond that.
Since Wikidata's aim is to build a structured database, it has additional software needs beyond what MediaWiki can provide. That's where Wikibase comes in: it's made for editing structured data. And because it's built on top of the MediaWiki software, this editing can be done collaboratively and openly, similarly to how Wikipedia (etc.) can be edited.
On a troubling note, the Wikibase website is down at the time. One unanswered question: is Wikibase an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation (as the MediaWiki software is)?
Data model summary edit
There are three kinds of entities: Datatype, Item, and Property.
Datatype edit
- Determines the type and shape that values may have.
- System-defined.
- IRI is supposedly of the form http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/name or datatype_name, but none of these pages seem to exist.
Item edit
- More to come.
Property edit
- More to come.
Available datatypes edit
Not all of these datatypes have implementations yet. See Special:ListDatatypes for a list of all datatypes currently available.
| Datatype | Value |
|---|---|
| Quantities | QuantityValue |
| Dates and times | TimeValue |
| Web resources and other IRIs | IriValue |
| Geographic locations | GlobeCoordinateValue |
| Geographic shapes | GeoShapeValue |
| Wikidata items | Item |
| Wikidata properties | Property |
| Media | MediaValue |
| Strings (not translated) | StringValue |
| Monolingual texts | MonolingualTextValue |
| Multilingual texts | MultilingualTextValue |
| Multilingual multi-texts | MultilingualMultiTextValue |
Resources edit
- Wikidata glossary
- Wikibase data model (technical specification)
- Wikibase data model primer