What is Wikidata?

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others.

Launched in 2012, Wikidata contains over 90 million data items spanning concepts, people, creative works, geographic locations, organizations, events, and more. Each item contains statements about that entity, like date of birth for a person, coordinates for a place, or cast members for a film. These statements cite external sources as references.

The goal of Wikidata is to provide a common source of open data that can be used and queried by other applications. For example, Wikipedia articles in different languages can pull data like population numbers or infobox templates directly from Wikidata so the information stays consistent and can easily be updated across all articles about that entity.

As an open collaborative database, anyone can contribute edits and additions to Wikidata, with changes reviewed by volunteer editors. Automated bots also pull in large datasets. This crowdsourced model allows Wikidata to grow quickly while maintaining high data quality.

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