How does Wikidata work?

This wiki is the Wikidata repository. The repository is the central storage for the data that may be accessed by the client Wikis connected to the repository. By maintaining the data in the repository, content loaded dynamically from Wikidata does not need to be translated nor has to be kept up to date in each individual client Wiki. In addition, Wikidata has centralized all Wikipedia interlanguage links.

The Wikidata repository

Items and their data are interconnected.
The Wikidata repository consists mainly of items, each outlined by a label, a description and likely one or more aliases. Sitelinks connect each item to corresponding articles on all client wikis. Statements describe detailed characteristics of each Item. Each statement consists of a property and a value. You can give mountain peaks, places, and buildings geographic coordinates. You can link a person to his or her place of birth, occupation, or to its number of an authority control database; link a politician to his or her political party; link an item about a township to its next higher administrative satuan; link a country to its highest representative and its national anthem; and so on. All this information can be displayed in any language, even if the data originated in a different language. When accessing these values client wikis will show the most up-to-date data.

Accessing the data
In pages on client Wikis you can access data using a Lua Scribunto interface. You can retrieve all data independently using the Wikidata API.

There is more to come
Wikidata is an ongoing project that is under active development. More data types as well as queries will be available in the future. You can find more information about Wikidata and its ongoing development on the Wikidata laman on Meta. Subscribe to the the Wikidata mailing daftar to receive up-to-date information about the development and to participate in discussions about the future of the project.

How can I contribute?
Go ahead and start editing. Editing is the best way to learn about the structure and concepts of Wikidata. If you would like to gain understanding of Wikidata's concepts upfront, you may want to have a look at the help pages. If you have questions, please feel gratis to drop them in the project chat or contact the development team.

Where to get started
Some links to get started :

Try out the Wikidata tours
Help with missing labels and descriptions
Help with interwiki conflicts and constraint violations
Improve a random item
Help translating