Let's look at the opening statement in more detail:

• Free. The data in Wikidata is published under theCreative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0, allowing the reuse of the data in many different scenarios. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the data, even for commercial purposes, without asking for permission.
• Collaborative. Data is entered and maintained by Wikidata editors, who decide on the rules of content creation and management. Automatedbots also enter data into Wikidata.
• Multilingual. Editing, consuming, browsing, and reusing the data is fully multilingual. Data entered in any language is immediately available in all other languages. Editing in any language is possible and encouraged.
• A secondary knowledge base. Wikidata records not just statements, but also their sources, and connections to other databases. This reflects the diversity of knowledge available and supports the notion of verifiability.
• Collecting structured data. Imposing a high degree of structured organization allows for easy reuse of data by Wikimedia projects and third parties, and enables computers to process and “understand” it.
• Support for Wikimedia wikis. Wikidata assists Wikipedia with more easily maintainable information boxes and links to other languages, thus reducing editing workload while improving quality. Updates in one language are made available to all other languages.
• Anyone in the world. Anyone can use data from Wikidata to build their applications and services.

Wikidata is a central storage repository that can be accessed by others, such as thewikis maintained by theWikimedia Foundation. Content loaded dynamically from Wikidata does not need to be maintained in each individual wiki project. For example, statistics, dates, locations, and other common data can be centralized in Wikidata.

The Wikidata repository consists mainly ofitems, each one having alabel, adescription and any number ofaliases. Items are uniquely identified by aQ followed by a number, such asDouglas Adams(Q42).

Statements describe detailed characteristics of an Item and consist of aproperty and avalue. Properties in Wikidata have aP followed by a number, such as witheducated at(P69).

For a person, you can add a property to specify where they were educated, by specifying a value for a school. For buildings, you can assign geographic coordinates properties by specifying longitude and latitude values. Properties can also link to external databases. A property that links an item to an external database, such as an authority control database used by libraries and archives, is called anidentifier. SpecialSitelinks connect an item to corresponding content on client wikis, such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks or Wikiquote.

All this information can be displayed in any language, even if the data originated in a different language. When accessing these values, client wikis will show the most up-to-date data.

There are a number of ways to access Wikidata using built-in tools, external tools, or programming interfaces.

• Wikidata Query Service andReasonator are some of the popular tools to search for and examine Wikidata items. Thetools page has an extensive list of interesting projects to explore.
• You canretrieve all data programmatically using different APIs and service.
• Client wikis can access data for their pages using aLua Scribunto interface.

Some links to get started:

• Set youruser options, especially the 'Babel' extension, to choose your language preferences
• Help with missinglabels and descriptions
• Help withinterwiki conflicts andconstraint violations
• Improve a random item
• Help translating

Go ahead andstart editing. Editing is the best way to learn about the structure and concepts of Wikidata. If you would like to read about Wikidata's concepts, have a look at thehelp pages. If you have questions, please feel free to drop them in theproject chat.

• Help:Contents
• Wikidata:Glossary

• Wikidata:Introduction
• Wikidata-en