Wikidata:Introduction/sandbox

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Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other Wikimedia projects, and well beyond that. Note that Wikidata is still under active development, and some functionalities still have to be deployed.

What is it ? edit

Like other Wikimedia projects, Wikidata is a free, collaborative project. It aims to store structured data on just about everything. It shuld be useful to Wikipedia, Wikicommons, and a host of other projects. It uses a specifically designed extension of MediaWiki (Wikibase) and emphasizes usability, multilinguality and machine-readability.

How is it structured ? edit

Wikidata mostly consist of items, pages about a particular topic stored in the main namespace. There are currently 109,464,762 of them. Every Wikipedia article should correspond to a Wikidata item, but some items may not correspond to any Wikipedia article.

Each item is identified by unmodifiable ID, and may contain the following elements:

a label - that looks like the title of the item. There should be one label by language.
a description - a short description There should be one description by language.
statements - pieces of information about the item. They are the most complex part of an item page.
sitelinks - links to Wikipedia articles about the same topic as the item.

See Q159, for an item containing all of those.

Another namespace of interest is "Property". Properties are instrumental in making statements about items.

How is it used ? edit

Wikidata was designed to be useful to both Wikimedia projects and third parties.

In Wikimedia projects

Centralize interwikis links:

Links between Wikipedia articles about the same subject in various languages used to be stored in separately in every single article. That highly redundant system needed was maintained through considerable human effort and bot activity. Some Wikipedias now rely on Wikidata's sitelinks to provide interwiki, easing the maintenance burden.

Populate infoboxes:

Many Wikipedia articles have "infoboxes" that provide quick facts about the article's topic. Creating them, and maintaining them up to date can be a daunting task, especially for smaller Wikipedias. Pooling resources on Wikidata should make things considerably easier.

Help with references:

It is important to provide adequate sources to Wikipedia articles. However adequately citing them can be time-consuming, and sometimes makes articles source-code hard to read. Wikidata could help with that too.

Outside Wikimedia

Wikidata good machine-readability, as well as its very permissive CC0 license also make it widely reusable by a variety of third parties.

Where do we stand ? edit

Wikidata has started to centralize Wikipedia interlanguage links (interwiki links). The interwiki links have gone live on the Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian and English Wikipedias. The rest of Wikipedias are planned to deployment on March 6th. The development is meanwhile focused on statements. You can find more information about Wikidata and its ongoing development on the Wikidata page on Meta.

The first phase (interwiki links) provides a centralized interwiki system as an alternative to the current system. It was deployed on Wikidata in October 2012. It has been deployed on four Wikipedias, and it is planned to be active on all Wikipedias by the end of February.
The second phase (infoboxes) gathers infobox-related data with the goal of filling the infoboxes with data from Wikidata. The first software version of phase 2 was deployed to Wikidata on February 4. It will be deployed a few weeks later on the first Wikipedias.
The third phase (lists) will allow the automatic updating and translation of list articles. Planned deployment of this phase on Wikidata is in March or April 2013.

That sounds cool. How can I help? edit

Thanks for your interest! Wikidata can only be a success if there is a critical mass of contributors to the project. We are aware that very different communities are interested in the work of Wikidata. The best way for now to keep up-to-date and to participate in discussions is to subscribe to the Wikidata mailing list.

Since you are here, maybe you are interested in starting the Wikidata community? This is a new, bare wiki, and we hope that the usual project spaces will be built and become alive. We also did not create a technical documentation of the software, how it works, how you add language links, what labels are for, etc. If you have questions, please feel free to ask the developers, and we would be thankful if documentation would start to be built on-wiki here.

If you have further questions, a lot of data can be found on the Wikidata portal on meta. Some links to get started follow:

Help with missing labels and descriptions
Help with interwiki conflicts and import
Help with entering data and suggesting properties and sources for the Phase II Use cases.
Improve a random item