Help:Learn Wikidata

This page is meant to get people familiar with Wikipedia up to speed quickly on Wikidata/Wikibase, and how we use it here.

Glossary

• Wikipedia: the encyclopedia-anyone-can-edit. Produces open data (CC0).
• MediaWiki: the software behind Wikipedia. Also, open source.
• WikiMedia: the foundation producing MediaWiki and hosting Wikipedia.
• Wikidata: the database-where-everyone-can-contribute. Produces open data (CC0). Hosted by WikiMedia.
• Wikibase: the software behind Wikidata, actually an extension to MediaWiki. Also, open source.
• wiki.personaldata.io: another instance, amongst others, of Wikibase, which is focused on personal data empowerment (and related topics).

How to learn?

If you want to learn how to edit here, this situation means you have a lot of choices. We assume here you are familiar with Wikipedia. Given that there is already a lot of documentation on how to edit on Wikidata, and a lot carries over here, we refer you to specific pages that are most helpful. We point out however some differences, in particular around community dynamics.

Topics

Tours

Wikidata offers some tours that are helpful.

Items

Items are the basic "nodes" in a large semantic graph. As such they are

Wikidata has several components:

• Help:Namespaces
• Help:Items
• Help:Properties
• Help:Templates
• Help:Templates depending on items
• Help:User scripts
• Help:Gadgets
• Help:Widgets
• Help:Modules