Training modules/dashboard/slides/12505-linking-the-world

Linking the world

Photo by Fastily, CC BY-SA 4.0.Alexa, Siri, and other personal digital assistants use Wikidata as one of the databases that supplies answers.

The fact that linked data is machine readable has far-reaching implications — from digital assistants to transparency to artificial intelligence.

Imagine being able to not only link to a website, but be able to link to specific concepts, individuals, media, and relationships within a website.

Wikipedia aims to share the sum of the world's knowledge. Imagine if you could organize that sum into similar concepts, values, and relationships. What if you could make all of Wikipedia a queryable database so that it could answer any questions you ask of it?

What if you wanted to know every single city that currently has a mayor who identifies as a woman? To do this on Wikipedia editors would have to do the research and manually make a list of these mayors, then they would have to manually update it when a woman is newly elected...in every language version of Wikipedia. Shouldn't there be an easier way to do this?

Wikidata, the linked data repository for all Wikimedia projects, can do this! For the answer to this question, click on this link. This link is to a query of Wikidata. We will discuss queries in depth later, but they allow you to pull out specific pieces of data from Wikidata.