Training modules/dashboard/slides/12410-presenting-facts-not-context

Presenting facts, not context

Wikipedia 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.