About

Wikidata is a secondary collaborative database that is curated by individuals to ultimately retrieve and store information. As of now, the database contains nearly 100 million data items, all of which can be edited by Wikidata users, at any given time.

Wikidata Items

For instance, below is an image of the item Philadelphia Musuem of Art. As the image shows, the museum is classified as an instance of another item, the art museum.

Items on Wikidata have several properties, which associate them with other items. In the example below, instance of (which is a property), connects the Philadelphia Museum of Art to other art museums.

Items and Properties have unique values. For instance, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has the value Q510324. Meanwhile, the value of the property, instance of, is P31.

Editing Items

Editing a Wikidata item is rather simple. First, a user must create a Wikidata account and log in. Then, they can search for the appropriate data item that they would like to edit. If a Wikidata item is available to edit (some, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are protected so that only specific individuals can edit them), then users can scroll down to the bottom and click the “add statement” button (for instance).

Next, they can search for a property to add. For instance, users can add information on where someone is born.

Once a statement of information is added, users can publish this information immediately, for all other Wikidata users to query and retrieve.

And Voila!

That is all there is - well, to get started, of course.

Wikidata is an amazing resource that can be used to query large amounts of information using tools such as SPARQL and Python. Information on Querying Wikidata can be found on our website in the Posts section!

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