Wikidata:Introduction

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Shortcuts: WD:INTRO, WD:I

Wikidata is a new project of the Wikimedia Foundation: a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other Wikimedia projects, and well beyond that.

What does this mean?

Items and their data are interconnected.

Let's look at the opening statement in more detail:

• A new project. Wikidata was the first new Wikimedia project since the inception of Wikiversity in 2006.
• Free. The data in Wikidata is published under a free license, allowing the reuse of the data in many different scenarios.
• Collaborative. The data in Wikidata is entered and maintained by Wikidata editors, who decide on the rules of content creation and management in Wikidata.
• Multilingual. Editing, consuming, browsing, and reusing the data is fully multilingual. Data entered in any language will immediately be available in all other languages; editing in any language will be possible and encouraged.
• A secondary database. Wikidata will record not just statements, but their sources, thus reflecting the diversity of knowledge available and supporting the notion of verifiability.
• Collecting structured data. Unlike Commons, which collects media files, and the Wikipedias, which produce encyclopedic articles, Wikidata will collect data, in a structured form. This will allow easy reuse of that data by Wikimedia projects and third parties, and will enable computers to easily process and “understand” it.
• Support for Wikimedia projects. One of the first goals of Wikidata is to support Wikipedia with more easily maintainable language links and infoboxes, thus reducing the workload in Wikipedia and increasing its quality.
• Support well beyond that. Everyone will be able to use Wikidata for a huge number of different services.

Wikidata has started to centralize Wikipedia interlanguage links (interwiki links). The interwiki links have gone live on all the Wikipedias.

You can find more information about Wikidata and its ongoing development on the Wikidata page on Meta.

Timeline of deployment on Wikidata

Former system: interwiki links between all languages		Phase 1 of Wikidata: links of all languages to one central point
Former system: Independent information about infoboxes in all languages		Phase 2 of Wikidata: Information for infoboxes of all languages on one central point

• 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 to all Wikipedias as of March 6th 2013 according to Status updates/2013 03 01.
• 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, though some elements still haven't been rolled out.
• The third phase (lists) will allow the automatic updating and translation of list articles. Planned deployment of this phase on Wikidata is in mid or late 2013.

What do we have so far?

We launched the Wikidata repository—that is the wiki you are currently looking at. For now, the aim of Wikidata is to collect the language links for Wikipedia articles. That is, you can go to a random page on Wikidata and check it out, and what you will find is a page that lists the language links for a specific topic, i.e. it lists all the articles on the different language editions of Wikipedia that are about the same topic.

Furthermore, you can add a short label, description and some aliases to the given item in the language of your interface. (By the way, you can switch your interface language choosing the Universal Language Selector on the top of every Wikidata page.)

All the Wikipedias have started to use the language links from Wikidata. The other functionality will be added piece by piece in the following weeks and months.

Since April 24, 2013 all Wikipedias have the ability to include data from Wikidata in their articles. For the moment 4 datatypes (Item, Commons media file, String, Time) can be used. Other data types will come in the course of time.

That sounds cool. How can I help?

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 after carefully reading of our existing drafts of help pages and got understanding of a current Wikidata structure.

Since you are here, maybe you are interested in starting the Wikidata community? This is a new, not long ago 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 be improved 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
• Help:Multilingual