Ten quick tips for editing Wikidata

Abstract

This article acts as a successor to the 10 simple rules for editing Wikipedia from a decade ago [1].It addresses Wikipedia's machine-readable cousin: Wikidata-a project potentially even more relevant from the point of view of Computational Biology.Wikidata is a free collaborative knowledgebase [2] providing structured data to every Wikipedia page and beyond.It relies on the same peer production principle as Wikipedia: anyone can contribute.Open, collaborative models often surprise in how productively they work in practice, given how unlikely they might be expected to work in theory.Nevertheless, they can still be met with a lot of resistance and suspicion in academic circles [3,4].Since its launch in 2012, Wikidata has rapidly grown into a cross-disciplinary open knowledgebase with items ranging from genes to cell types to researchers [2,[5][6][7].It has wide-ranging applications, such as validating statistical information about disease outbreaks [8], aligning resources on human coronaviruses [9], or assessing biodiversity [10,11].It can be thought of as a vast network graph (Fig 1A), wherein the items act as nodes (now over 100 million) linked to one another by over a billion statements, and further linked out to the wider web by many billions more.We'll link to example Wikidata items and properties by using italics throughout the text as we refer to them (Fig 1).The online interface makes the items themselves somewhat human-readable (Fig 1B ), but their structured nature makes it possible to query and combine the information in ways that can't be achieved for information sources written entirely in prose.This versatility makes its applications in computational biology, arguably, even more universal and flexible than just relying on Wikipedia alone [12].Queries on Wikidata can vary from which gene variants predict a positive prognosis in colorectal cancer to taxa by number of streets in the Netherlands that bear their name.We'll try to use examples relevant to computational biology, but bear in mind that the same can be done with almost everything from a map of mediaeval witch executions in Scotland to emergency phone numbers by population using them to paintings depicting frogs.Since it's under a CC0 copyright waiver, Wikidata's structured content is essentially released into the public domain to be used on other projects [13].You'll probably have already seen its structured data at the top of search engine results but it's also used behind the scenes

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