Wikidata
In plain wordsA free, shared collection of facts about millions of things — people, places, books, chemicals — kept by volunteers in the Wikipedia family and laid out so programs can use it as easily as people.
A volunteer-edited knowledge graphknowledge graph, n.: A huge web of facts stored as connections between things — 'Paris is the capital of France', 'Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize' — that computers can search, combine and reason over., hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, whose basic unit is the item: an entity with a language-independent identifier (Q2 is the planet Earth), labels in many languages, and statements pairing properties (P-identifiers) with values, refined by qualifiers and supported by references. Its content is dedicated to the public domain (CC0), queryable through a public SPARQL service and exportable as RDFResource Description Framework, prop. n.: A web standard for writing facts as simple three-part statements — subject, relation, object — using web addresses as names, so that data from different sources can be merged automatically.. Wikidata supplies data to Wikipedia infoboxes, libraries, research databases, search engines and voice assistants, and it is widely used to build entity-linking systems, question-answering benchmarks, knowledge-graph embeddingsknowledge graph embedding, n.: A way of turning the things and relations in a knowledge graph into lists of numbers, so a computer can guess missing facts from patterns, such as predicting where someone was born. and factual groundinggrounding, n.: Connecting an AI's words to something real — trusted documents, a live search, images or the physical world — so that its answers rest on evidence rather than only on what it absorbed in training. for language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code.. As of early 2025 it held about 1.65 billion statements.
Origin
Launched on 29 October 2012 as the Wikimedia Foundation's first new project since 2006, developed by Wikimedia Deutschland with initial funding from the Allen Institute for AI, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Google. Google announced in December 2014 that it would close Freebase in Wikidata's favor, and an embedding-based search service supporting the Model Context Protocol launched in October 2025.
Related
- knowledge graphknowledge graph, n.: A huge web of facts stored as connections between things — 'Paris is the capital of France', 'Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize' — that computers can search, combine and reason over.
- semantic websemantic web, n.: An effort to label data on the web in a standard, precise way so that programs, not only human readers, can tell what it means and connect facts drawn from many different sites.
- Resource Description FrameworkResource Description Framework, prop. n.: A web standard for writing facts as simple three-part statements — subject, relation, object — using web addresses as names, so that data from different sources can be merged automatically.
- knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up.
- knowledge graph embeddingknowledge graph embedding, n.: A way of turning the things and relations in a knowledge graph into lists of numbers, so a computer can guess missing facts from patterns, such as predicting where someone was born.
- groundinggrounding, n.: Connecting an AI's words to something real — trusted documents, a live search, images or the physical world — so that its answers rest on evidence rather than only on what it absorbed in training.
Sources
- Vrandečić, D. & Krötzsch, M. (2014). Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase. Communications of the ACM 57(10), 78–85.
Mentioned in
knowledge baseknowledge base, n.: A store of facts and rules that a program can reason with: like a database, but organized so that new conclusions can be worked out from it, not just looked up., knowledge graphknowledge graph, n.: A huge web of facts stored as connections between things — 'Paris is the capital of France', 'Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize' — that computers can search, combine and reason over., semantic websemantic web, n.: An effort to label data on the web in a standard, precise way so that programs, not only human readers, can tell what it means and connect facts drawn from many different sites., ConceptNetConceptNet, prop. n.: A free, crowd-built network of everyday facts — 'a knife is used for cutting', 'rain makes things wet' — in many languages, which AI systems use to make sense of ordinary situations., knowledge graph embeddingknowledge graph embedding, n.: A way of turning the things and relations in a knowledge graph into lists of numbers, so a computer can guess missing facts from patterns, such as predicting where someone was born., Resource Description FrameworkResource Description Framework, prop. n.: A web standard for writing facts as simple three-part statements — subject, relation, object — using web addresses as names, so that data from different sources can be merged automatically.