Collaborate/Wikidata

Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects and the wider web.

Wikidata's facts are meant to be sourced, with citations and links to the official, or scholarly, source of data. It can handle fuzzy and unreliable data, especially useful for contested or disputed information, with the system able to support multiple values for all properties, and attribute these claims to different sources.

Wikidata is concerned with reliable, checkable, and up-to-date facts about notable people and things (usually, those that have a Wikipedia article). Hence Wikidata is not usually for time series data or the primary data of a research project.

Visualisation of Poland constructed from Wikidata's geographical data

Wikidata makes data available freely, without restriction and in a variety of machine-readable formats. This enables data to be shared through the whole web, and allows the creation of novel gadgets and tools to visualise and explore the data.

As of Summer 2013, Wikidata is under rapid development. It has statements about many millions of entities, but some of ways to add or extract data are still being created. Coming soon is the ability of Wikidata to populate information boxes in Wikipedia articles, so that a fact updated in Wikidata will then be updated in the many language versions of Wikipedia.

Examples of data

• Biographical facts for notable current or historical figures: birth and death dates and locations, jobs and official posts held, doctoral adviser, military rank, alma mater and so on
• Place data including the longitude, latitude and administrative area of a town or village (enabling data-driven maps, for example)
• Properties of cultural works including creation date, genre, inspiration, author, performer, composer
• Scientific classifications, including of species, chemicals, languages, drugs, aircraft, and scientific publications
• Authority file identifiers of people, chemicals, publications and other entities
• Properties of events such as political elections or sports matches
• Genealogy of notable figures (such as the Bach family)

What could you do?

• By updating Wikidata, linking back to a reliable source, you bring that knowledge to the widest possible audience through Wikipedia and other sites, while directing them to the source for verification.
• Attend a training event to get started, or start with Wikidata's online help.

Next steps

• If you are in a Jisc-funded project, contact the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador, Martin Poulter, (martin.poulterwikimedia.org.uk).
• Wikimedia UK is providing in-person Wikidata training for other cultural and scholarly organisations (infowikimedia.org.uk).
• On Wikidata itself, Wikidata:Introduction is a good starting point.

This page has been created as part of the 2013-14 partnership between Jisc and Wikimedia UK

This page uses text from wikidata:Main page and wikipedia:WP:AHRC.