# Wikidata

13 Hacker News commenters recommended Wikidata and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A free, community-edited knowledge base of structured data linking entities like books, species and companies by shared identifiers, queryable with SPARQL. Coverage is uneven and varies by topic.

## Why people recommend it

- Links many IDs in one query (3 comments): "Gives us the ISBN, Goodreads work id, LibraryThing id, the OpenLibrary id, and the Google Knowledge Graph id all in one query." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154772)) "it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572393)) "link your data to wikidata which will get you free connection back to crunchbase" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48612753))
- Structured translation relationships for works (2 comments): "Wikidata was the biggest surprise. It has structured translation data for thousands of works" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47310736)) "it has structured translation relationships that none of the others provide" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314966))
- Useful for many public datasets (2 comments): "is already enabling plenty of useful queries about all sorts of publicly-available data and entities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960301)) "you might be interested in another database listing feeds: Wikidata" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48048654))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Wikipedia](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wikipedia.md): 404 recommend
- [Grokipedia](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grokipedia.md): 52 recommend
- [Local Wikipedia](https://hackerapproved.com/p/local-wikipedia.md): 45 recommend
- [Britannica11.org](https://hackerapproved.com/p/britannica11-org.md): 14 recommend
- [Wiktionary](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wiktionary.md): 12 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Wikidata", https://hackerapproved.com/p/wikidata/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).