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 monuments, and journal articles (discussed further below). Each of these subcommunities contributes to an ever growing body of knowledge created as linked open data.

Figure 2. Wikidata item creation page. Creating an item in Wikidata can be done by anyone, through either the item creation page, or tools that allow for batch item creation.

Entities are the elements of the Wikidata knowledge base, which can be either items or properties. Entities act similar to terms in a controlled vocabulary. Both item and property entities have their own section of the project,42 and each entity has a Wikidata page. They are assigned unique identifiers, using the letter "Q" for items and "P" for properties, followed by unique numbers. All entities can have labels (preferred name of the entity), descriptions (short description of the entity), and may have aliases (alternative names) in multiple languages.

Items contain data describing a single topic, object, or concept.43 Items contain a series of statements in the form of a property-value pair, which can be further enriched by the use of qualifiers. For instance, the following statement in Wikidata describes the fact that the novel The Able McLaughlins won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The statement ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations