User:Bene*/Wikidata basics

Welcome

Wikidata

Welcome to this introduction to the basics of Wikidata.

Wikidata is a project where people from all around the world collaboratively collect and maintain data in a lot of languages. This data is open and free to use by anyone. For example, Wikipedia and its sister projects use it. The data also can be edited by anyone. This tour will show you how to edit your first item on Wikidata.

The basic idea

In Wikidata, everything is about structured data. This makes it possible for humans and computers alike to use it and opens up a whole lot of amazing opportunities you'll learn more about at a later point. To do all this, we need abstract objects representing the things we see in our daily life. These objects are called items in Wikidata.

Each item has a unique identifier. It always looks similar to Q12345. This is super useful for machines and helps Wikidata serve people in a lot of languages. But it is not very human-friendly. We will solve this in the next step. Let's fill the item about Paris, the capital of France, now. This will be a page where we will collect all the data we have about Paris.

Labels

Each item can have a name in your language (and many more languages). We call them labels here. Here are some general things you should remember about labels:

A label is like a page title which describes what the item is about. It should be as short as possible (e.g. "Paris", not "Paris, France")
Labels do not have to be unique as they are disambiguated by descriptions - more on this later
Use the subject's most common name and only capitalize proper nouns (like London, Jupiter, or Hillary Clinton—but not city, planet, or politician)

Create a label

Click into the box and enter the label "Paris" for this item. After that, click on "save".

Edit a label

If you now want to modify the label, click on "edit", enter a new label and then click on "save" again.

Descriptions

As already mentioned, descriptions are used to disambiguate an item's label and describe it more detailed. The following bullet points are important to know:

A description describes and disambiguates the label (e.g. "town in Ontario" or "county seat of Lamar County, Texas" would describe different places called Paris)
Keep it short—descriptions are not sentences
Be as accurate and neutral as possible—avoid using information that will change with time or is considered controversial
Descriptions should not normally begin with initial articles (like "the" or "a")
Tip: Wikipedia is a good resource for coming up with descriptions for items—often the first two sentences of a page for an item will provide enough information

Create and edit descriptions

Descriptions can be edited just like labels. To save the description, click "save"; to edit it click "edit". Now enter a description like "capital of France".

Aliases

If the item is also known under another name, you can add this as an alias. Note that an item can only have one label and description but several aliases for each language. About aliases you should remember:

Aliases are alternative names
Make sure to only capitalize proper nouns

Create and edit aliases

Editing aliases is a bit different but also quite similar to editing labels and descriptions. You have to first click the "add" button to add an alias because not all items might have one. It's also possible to add multiple aliases for one item by clicking "edit"—a new text box will appear for you to type in. To remove an alias, click on the "x" next to it. If you have finished, click on "save". A good alias for Paris might be "City of Light" as it is commonly referred to as.

Congratulations!

Congratulations, you finished your first tutorial about Wikidata. Perhaps you want to get back to the overview. Also, as you perhaps already realized, this is not the real item about Paris but only a "sandbox". The real item about the city of love is Q90.

As you may have already seen, there can be stored much more information about an item than only labels, descriptions and aliases. There are for example sitelinks and statements. You can learn more about them in the next tours.

Do you still have any questions? The links below may help you: