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IN-CONFERENCE 
WORKSHOPS

Introduction to Wikidata
The Wikipedia of Facts
By Clifford B. Anderson, Vanderbilt University

ABSTR ACT This paper briefly summarizes an in-conference work-
shop about Wikidata and its potential uses for scholarly communica-
tions in religious studies and theology.

This in-conference workshop introduced Wikidata,1 a project to 
collect and organize factual information from Wikipedia and other 
sources. Wikidata started in October 20122 and has grown to more 
than 50,000,000 items during its first six years.3 These facts do not 
relate to the English Wikipedia alone; increasingly, they connect the 
300 language editions of Wikipedia.

Wikidata organizes data in a structured format called “state-
ments.”4 These statements consist of three primary parts: items 
(“subject”), predicates (“property”), and objects (“values”). For 
instance, Wikidata records the founding date of the Christian Theo-
logical Seminary in Indianapolis as “Christian Theological Semi-
nary” (item), “inception” (property), “1855” (value).5 Since there are 
different language editions of Wikipedia, and Wikidata cannot afford 
to privilege any single edition (like the English Wikipedia), Wikidata 
uses its own system of letters and numbers to refer to items, proper-
ties, and values. The internal representation of the statement above 



308  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

is “Q5110194 P571 1855.” Thankfully, Wikidata provides robust tools 
to translate from codes into the language of your choice.

All data in Wikidata is queryable. The query language of Wikidata is 
SPARQL or the “SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language,” which the 
W3C developed to query linked data.6 These SPARQL queries under-
score the power of Wikidata, allowing users to ask complex questions 
(“Which paintings of Mary include images of books?”) and to visualize 
the results.7 The possibilities for visualizations include charts, image 
galleries, maps, and timelines, among others. Visualizations may be 
embedded on websites, and data from queries may be downloaded 
and reused freely.

The types of information described in Wikidata vary broadly, from 
architectural objects to films to people. A large percentage of Wiki-
data entries (42.4%) are about scholarly articles. A movement called 
WikiCite8 is working toward adding bibliographic data about all scien-
tific literature to Wikidata, including scholarly articles in the field of 
religious studies and theology. In “Scholia, Scientometrics and Wiki-
data,” Finn Årup Nielsen, Daniel Mietchen, and Egon Willighagen 
describe their work on Scholia,9 an open source tool to build scholarly 
and institutional profiles on the basis of bibliographic and related 
data in Wikidata.10

Since Wikidata is a crowdsourced resource like Wikipedia, 
it suffers from unevenness. Much more information exists about 
churches, for example, in New York City than in Indianapolis. The 
gaps in Wikidata’s knowledge base reflect the distribution and demo-
graphics of its volunteer editors. As Wikidata becomes increasingly 
central to the future of scholarly communications, theological librar-
ians should take efforts to add and expand items about articles, books, 
denominations, institutions, and scholars in the field.

The full presentation, along with sample SPARQL queries, is avail-
able on Github.11

WORKS CITED

DuCharme, Bob. Learning SPARQL: Querying and Updating with SPARQL 
1.1. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2013.

Nielsen, Finn Årup, Daniel Mietchen, and Egon Willighagen. “Scho-
lia, Scientometrics and Wikidata.” In The Semantic Web: ESWC 



In-Conference Workshops  309

2017 Satellite Events, edited by Eva Blomqvist, Katja Hose, Heiko 
Paulheim, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Fabio Ciravegna, and Olaf 
Hartig, 237–59. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Inter-
national Publishing, 2017. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-
319-70407-4_36.

Vrandečić, Denny, and Markus Krötzsch. “Wikidata: A Free Collab-
orative Knowledgebase.” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 10 
(September 2014): 78–85. doi:10.1145/2629489.

NOTES

1 See https://www.wikidata.org.
2 Denny Vrandečić and Markus Krötzsch, “Wikidata: A Free 

Collaborative Knowledgebase,” Communications of the ACM 57, no. 
10 (September 2014): 80, doi:10.1145/2629489.

3 See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Statistics.
4 See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction.
5 See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5110194.
6 Bob DuCharme, Learning SPARQL: Querying and Updating with 

SPARQL 1.1, 2nd ed. (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2013).
7 See http://tinyurl.com/y7p67o24.
8 See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite.
9 See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Scholia.
10 Finn Årup Nielsen, Daniel Mietchen, and Egon Willighagen, 

“Scholia, Scientometrics and Wikidata,” in The Semantic Web: 
ESWC 2017 Satellite Events, ed. Eva Blomqvist et al., Lecture Notes 
in Computer Science (Springer International Publishing, 2017), 
237–59, doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70407-4_36.

11 See https://gist.github.com/CliffordAnderson/97116b3a3874c59
f61c18a9cc2f05576.

https://www.wikidata.org
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Statistics
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/
http://tinyurl.com/y7p67o24
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Scholia
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70407-4_36
https://gist.github.com/CliffordAnderson/97116b3a3874c59f61c18a9cc2f05576
https://gist.github.com/CliffordAnderson/97116b3a3874c59f61c18a9cc2f05576

