Template:Sister projects overview/part 4/en-gb
Understanding Wikidata
Instead of pages (the main type of content for most wikis), Wikidata is made up of items. Items are used to represent all the things in human knowledge, including topics, concepts, and objects. For example, the 1988 Summer Olympics, love, Elvis Presley, and gorilla are all items in Wikidata. Each item also has a unique identifier (starting with a Q prefix) and its own page in the Wikidata main namespace. For example, for the items listed above, 1988 Summer Olympics (Q8470), love (Q316), Elvis Presley (Q303) and Gorilla (Q36611) are the respective item pages. These pages are where all the data for each item is added, edited, and maintained, including links to other Wikimedia project sites (these are known as sitelinks or interwiki links).
Each page has four sections:
- At the top is the Label, the Description and any aliases. You will see these in your selected language but Wikidata also has these in other languages. If you have Babel Box in your User page then you will see the label, description and aliases in the languages you have listed there.
- The next section of the item page are the statements. Each of these starts with a property. This followed by an value which will have one of the following datatypes;- an item, a date, a text string, a monolingual text, or a number (which may have units) . These values can have qualifiers - additional statements each with a property and an value - and a reference - statements describing where the main statement can be confirmed. Some times a property has two or more values each of which can have qualifiers and references.
- Next come the external identifiers, special forms of statements like the above, but supplying identifiers used in other databases (with links where possible).
- The next section of the page groups sitelinks. Links to the one page on each wiki which deals with the topic of this item. These sitelinks are used by various Wikimedia projects to create language links on the corresponding wiki pages. These links are also used to identify the item from which the wiki page can import statement info, for example to fill infoboxes.