Wikidata
Hacker ApprovedRanked 5 of 7 online encyclopedias by recommenders
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.
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.
15 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 87%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 6.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Links many IDs in one query
“Gives us the ISBN, Goodreads work id, LibraryThing id, the OpenLibrary id, and the Google Knowledge Graph id all in one query.”
Comment from 25 Feb 2026 in “The Perils of ISBN” “it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query”
Comment from 11 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates G Books, ISBNDB, and more” “link your data to wikidata which will get you free connection back to crunchbase”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: StartupWiki – A Free Alternative to Crunchbase” Structured translation relationships for works
“Wikidata was the biggest surprise. It has structured translation data for thousands of works”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Zenòdot – Find if a book has been translated into your language” “it has structured translation relationships that none of the others provide”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Zenòdot – Find if a book has been translated into your language” Useful for many public datasets
“is already enabling plenty of useful queries about all sorts of publicly-available data and entities”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “A graph explorer of the Epstein emails” “you might be interested in another database listing feeds: Wikidata”
Comment from 7 May 2026 in “RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google”
Other online encyclopedias people recommend
The four most recommended other online encyclopedias, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 404 | 327 | 55% | 12 | 20 yrs15 owners | — |
| Grokipedia | 52 | 161 | 24% | 10 | — | — |
| Local Wikipedia | 45 | 9 | 83% | 1 | — | — |
| Britannica11.org | 14 | 6 | 70% | 1 | — | — |
| WikidataThis page | 13 | 2 | 87% | 8 | — | Approved |
What people said
All 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Its limited to things in Wikidata rather than using OSM”
“adding Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons links can be awesome”
“you could add those data to Wikidata”
“link your data to wikidata which will get you free connection back to crunchbase”
“I rather like Wikidata and see a lot of untapped potential in it”
“you might be interested in another database listing feeds: Wikidata”
“you can use Sparql to perform structured queries on Wikidata”
“data was limited to family, basic stuff”
“it has structured translation relationships that none of the others provide”
“Wikidata was the biggest surprise. It has structured translation data for thousands of works”
“Gives us the ISBN, Goodreads work id, LibraryThing id, the OpenLibrary id, and the Google Knowledge Graph id all in one query.”
“the quality of wikidata greatly increased for the books that deal with”
“but not if I search by ISBN, which makes it hard to find”
“Both great sources, though.”
“you could also contribute your work to WikiData”
“it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query”
“it's piecemeal coverage, tags different from one entity to another”
“is already enabling plenty of useful queries about all sorts of publicly-available data and entities”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.