Training modules/dashboard/slides/12410-presenting-facts-not-context
Presenting facts, not context
editWikipedia presents information in a plain language format that's easy to read but difficult to query. Comparisons across a whole range of articles is especially difficult.
You can read about Marie Curie's occupations in a sentence on Wikipedia.
Her Wikipedia biography says:
Marie Skłodowska Curie (born Maria Salomea Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
If we want to translate this into Wikidata, we select an item, Marie Curie, about whom we can make a variety of statements. For example: Marie Curie was a physicist, she was a chemist, and she worked on radioactivity.
| item | property | value |
|---|---|---|
| Marie Curie | occupation | physicist |
| Marie Curie | occupation | chemist |
| Marie Curie | field of work | radioactivity |
Where Wikipedia is great at capturing the context around the subject of an article, Wikidata is designed to express facts.