Page:ARL White Paper on Wikidata Opportunities and Recommendations.pdf/19

 knowledge panels, the summarized claims to the right of a set of search results.

The first use for Wikidata was populating and supporting the connection between articles on different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, Wikidata acts as a central hub linking the article in the French-language edition of Wikipedia about “the French Revolution” with the article in the English Wikipedia and the Swahili Wikipedia, along with the 138 other language Wikipedias that have an article about this concept. If an article is created in a new language edition of Wikipedia (for instance, if someone starts an article about the French Revolution on the Igbo Wikipedia, which as of 2018 does not have one), the link to that article can be added to the Wikidata item, and the link to Igbo will be automatically populated across the other editions of Wikipedia.

As support for new data properties in Wikidata and coverage for Wikipedia projects expanded, an increasing number of other data sets and sources of information became the foundation for adding more and more topics and properties on Wikidata, including matching sets of external “identifiers,” which includes URIs, name authorities, and controlled vocabularies from other data sources around the web. Wikidata includes one item for every topic that has a Wikipedia article in any language (including meta-items like Wikipedia categories); but it also now includes millions of items for topics that do not have an associated Wikipedia article that meet Wikidata’s simpler notability requirements. Topics in Wikidata may never become Wikipedia articles, either because the topic is missing in Wikipedia or because Wikipedia editors have not found the topic notable enough for a stand-alone Wikipedia article. For example, Wikidata projects were developed to create items and contribute data related to paintings, ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations