Wikidata

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, 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 avilable for reuse. Wikidata is powered by the software Wikibase.

Concepts

Wikidata is a document-oriented database, focused around 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.