Wikidata

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For Wikipedia's information page on Wikidata, please see Wikipedia:Wikidata.
Wikidata
Wikidata logo
Screenshot of Wikidata's Main page
Main page of Wikidata
Web address www.wikidata.org
Commercial? No
Type of site
Registration Optional
Available in Multilingual
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Wikimedia community
Launched 30 October 2012; 11 years ago (2012-10-30)
Alexa rank
 Increase 18,383 (May 2016) [1]

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of data which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia,[2][3] and by anyone else, under a "public domain" licence. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for media files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects, and which are also freely available for reuse. Wikidata is powered by the software Wikibase.[4]

Concepts

Screenshots
Wikidata screenshot
Three statements from Wikidata's item on the planet Mars. Values include links to other items and to Wikimedia Commons.
Wikidata screenshot
A layout of the four main components of a phase-1 Wikidata page: the label, description, aliases and interlanguage links.
Wikipedia screenshot
A Wikipedia article's list of interlanguage links as they appeared in an edit box (left) and on the article's page (right) prior to Wikidata. Each link in these lists is to an article that requires its own list of interlanguage links to the other articles; this is the information centralized by Wikidata.
Click here to visit the Wikidata entry for the article featured.
Wikidata screenshot
The "Edit links" link takes the reader to Wikidata to edit interlanguage links.

Wikidata is a document-oriented database, focused on items. Each item represents a topic (or an administrative page used to maintain Wikipedia) and is identified by a unique number, prefixed with the letter Q—for example, the item for the topic Politics is Q7163. This enables the basic information required to identify the topic the item covers to be translated without favouring any language.

Information is added to items by creating statements. Statements take the form of key-value pairs, with each statement consisting of a property (the key) and a value linked to the property.

This diagram shows the most important terms used in Wikidata

Development history

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 €1.3 million.[5][6] Initial development of the project is being overseen by Wikimedia Deutschland and has been split into three phases:[7]

  1. Centralising interlanguage links – links between Wikipedia articles about the same topic in different languages
  2. Providing a central place for infobox data for all Wikipedias
  3. Creating and updating list articles based on data in Wikidata

Phase 1

Wikidata was launched on 30 October 2012 and was the first new project of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006.[2][8][9] At this time, only the first phase 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.

Historically, a Wikipedia article would include a list of interlanguage links, being links to articles on the same topic in other editions of Wikipedia, if present. Initially, Wikidata was a self-contained repository of interlanguage links. No Wikipedia language editions were able to access Wikidata, so they needed to continue to maintain their own lists of interlanguage links. On 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata.[10] This functionality was extended to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias on 30 January, to the English Wikipedia on 13 February and to all other Wikipedias on 6 March.[11][12][13][14] After no consensus was reached over a proposal to restrict the removal of language links from the English Wikipedia,[15] the power to delete them from the English Wikipedia was granted to automatic editors (bots).

Phase 2

The first aspects of the second phase were deployed on 4 February 2013, introducing statements to Wikidata entries. The values were initially limited to two data types (items and images on Wikimedia Commons), with more data types (such as coordinates and dates) to follow later. The first new type, string, was deployed on 6 March.[16]

The ability of the various language editions of Wikipedia to access data added to Wikidata as part of phase two was rolled out progressively between 27 March and 25 April 2013.[17][18]

Phase 3

Phase 3 will involve database querying and the creation of lists based on data stored on Wikidata.[7]

Reception

There is concern that the project is being influenced by lobbying companies, PR professionals and search engine optimizers.[19]

According to Wikimedia statistics, half of the information in Wikidata is unsourced.[19] Another 30% is labeled as having come from Wikipedia, but with no indication as to which article.[19]

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Wikidata (Archived at WebCite)
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Wikibase
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

Retrieved from "https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Wikidata&oldid=720528046"