What Is Wikidata and What Is It Used For?

Wikidata is a free, open knowledge base that stores structured data and can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It is best understood as the shared data layer behind Wikipedia and its sister projects: instead of repeating the same facts in every language edition, those projects pull core data from Wikidata. According to its main page, it currently holds more than 123 million data entities, and anyone can edit it.

How Wikidata relates to Wikipedia

Wikipedia holds articles written as prose. Wikidata holds the underlying facts in a structured, language-neutral form — for example, that a person was born on a certain date, worked in a certain field, or is connected to a certain place.

That structure matters because a single statement on Wikidata can feed many pages at once:

• Wikipedia uses it for infoboxes, interlanguage links, and reference data.
• Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and other sister projects draw on it for their own structured needs.
• Non-Wikimedia sites and services also reuse it, so its reach goes well beyond the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Because the data is stored once and reused everywhere, a correction in one place can propagate to many projects and languages.

What you can actually do with it

Wikidata supports several distinct activities, depending on whether you want to consume data or contribute it.

Use data from Wikidata

The content is released under a free license and can be exported in standard formats. It can also be linked to other open datasets on the linked data web, which makes it useful for anyone building on open data rather than just reading it.

For querying, Wikidata offers a SPARQL query service. This lets you ask structured questions across the whole dataset instead of looking items up one at a time.

Contribute to Wikidata

Anyone can edit, and the project provides a path for newcomers:

• Follow the editing tutorials to learn how contributions work.
• Join a WikiProject if you want to work with other volunteers on a subject you care about.
• Individuals and organizations can donate data rather than editing it in manually.

Learn what it is

If you are starting from zero, the introduction explains the concept, and a featured item — the entry for author Douglas Adams, Q42 — is a commonly used example for seeing how a real item is structured.

The community side

Wikidata is not just a database; it has an active volunteer community. You can create a user account, visit the community portal, or attend a Wikidata event. For questions and discussion, the Project chat, Telegram groups, and a live IRC chat are all available.

One current example of community activity: the Wikidata Query Service Days 2026, running October 17 to 23 as an online event. It focuses on migrating the Query Service from Blazegraph to QLever and helping the community, tool maintainers, and data reusers adapt their queries and tools to the new endpoint.

When Wikidata is the right tool

Wikidata fits well when you need structured, reusable, openly licensed facts that many applications or languages should share — and when you want those facts to stay consistent across all of them. It is less suited to storing long-form prose or content that only makes sense in one language or one context; that is what the individual Wikimedia projects are for.

If your goal is simply to read an encyclopedia article, go to Wikipedia. If your goal is to query, reuse, or contribute the data underneath it, Wikidata is the place to start.