What is Wikidata?

Wikidata is a free linked database of secondary data that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.

Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others.

NB: You can access the other projects from the foot of Wikipedia’s front page and from the foot of Wikidata’s front page.

Watch – A beginners guide to utilising Wikimedia’s linked open data platform (3 minute video by the National Library of Wales).

What is Wikidata actually?

• A repository of the world’s knowledge.
• A database that anyone can read and edit.
• multilingual.
• designed to deal with the reality Wikidata has to deal with.
• free and open source software.
• All data is CC-0 licenced meaning it can be used by anyone.

Watch – The global knowledge base: open data about everything | Dr. Martin Poulter | 15 minute TEDx talk

The main links you need to be aware of:

• Wikidata
• The Wikidata Query Service – for getting data out of Wikidata.
• Wikidata tools – lots of handy tools for working with Wikidata here.
• The Propbrowse tool in particular is very useful.
• Wikidata example queries – use these as a jumping off point for creating your own!
• Dr. Martin Poulter’s Wikidata queries – more excellent query ideas here.

Some stats about Wikidata

• Wikidata will be THIRTEEN years old as of October 2025. Happy birthday Wikidata!
• 116.8 million unique items of data. (67 million more items since November 2017).
• 1,247,700,645+ statements within these items of data.
• 2,333,228,211 edits since it launched in 2012.
• ~25,152 active users.
• 313 approved bots.
• scholarly articles: 22,574,314 items (31.5% of total items)
• humans: 6,376,879 items (8.9% of total items)
• architectural structures:  3,159,472 (4.4% of total items)
• More detail at Wikidata Statistics.

A short intro to the main tools when adding data to Wikidata

NB: Firstly consult Wikidata’s Data Import Hub.

1.Manual editing by user. (Video tutorial 1) (Video tutorial 2).

2.Mass editing using tools e.g.

a)The Mix n Match tool allows you to match an external data set to Wikidata items.

b)Importing data from Google Spreadsheets into the Quickstatements tool. (Video tutorial 1) (Video tutorial 2). (Exemplar sheet). The syntax you need is explained in QuickStatements v.1 and you can use the Wikidata plug-in for Google Sheets to make wrangling the data in Google Sheets easier.

c) RECOMMENDED method: Open source software OpenRefine (previously known as Google Refine) has a nifty Wikidata plugin to help reconcile and clean up data ready for export to QuickStatements. OpenRefine guidance and beginners video tutorial and a new Bulk Editing/Data Item Creation with OpenRefine tutorial by student intern, Maggie Lin.

3.Bot editing (making edits over the API) e.g. ProteinBoxBot

See the Bots request section of the Data Import Guide.