A Brief Introduction to Wikidata – Towards Data Science

"Have you ever heard about Wikidata? If not, you might think of Wikipedia first — and that is not wrong. Wikidata is also a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. In particular: “Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia (…).” Loosely, you could describe Wikidata as Wikipedias database with over 46million data items (April 2018). And in line with Wikimedia’s mission, everyone can add and edit data, and use it for free.

Available data

Like Wikipedia, there are all kinds of data stored in Wikidata. As such, when you are looking for a specific dataset or if you want to answer a curious question, it can be a good start looking for that data at Wikidata first. Example questions: What is the capital city of every member of the European Union and how many inhabitants live there? How do the Nobel Prize winners in Physics look like? Which countries use 112 as an emergency number? (To see the answer, scroll down) Advantages and Disadvantages of Wikidata There are some aspects you should keep in mind when using Wikidata. Whether they are an advantage or disadvantage, however, depends on you: a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines contains various data types (e.g. text, images, quantities, coordinates, geographic shapes, dates) uses SPARQL Especially the last aspect allows you very interesting questions like to ones above. If you have never used SPARQL before, however, it might be a struggle in the beginning. But don’t worry. The next section gives you a brief introduction...."