Introduction

"[I]n the most general sense," writes the English-language Wikipedia, "a model is anything used in any way to represent anything else". Wikidata represents knowledge by using a collection of items, properties, and data values to form statements. Often, to represent what is known about something—for example, a musical album—requires more than one item, each of which has as set of statements; the statements each consist of a property with one or more values. Help:Modelling aims to present the current way to represent something in wikidata, in general and domain-by-domain, and should point to good examples for many common domains. Help:Statements is another useful related resource; Help:Modelling attempts to present entire domains of application, i.e., not statement-by-statement but with a more global view, as a set of statements and items.

Intended audience

Help:Modelling is targeted for people who already have moderate-to-expert experience in data modeling and want to learn specifically how to model in Wikidata. In general, Help:Modelling does not explain basic data modeling concepts, nor is this a "how-to" about the user interface. Some of the examples here are quite advanced and will mainly be of interest to people who have already done some basic work in Wikidata and are trying to get ideas for how to attack a comparatively difficult modeling problem.

Beginners will probably do far better to start with Wikidata:Tours and go on from there.