wikidata-api-guide

name	wikidata-api-guide
description	Query Wikidata SPARQL for scholarly metadata, authors, and entities
metadata	{"openclaw":{"emoji":"🌐","category":"literature","subcategory":"metadata","keywords":["wikidata","sparql","linked-data","metadata","knowledge-graph","scholarly"],"source":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service"}}

Wikidata SPARQL API Guide

Overview

Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual knowledge base maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It contains structured data about millions of entities including scholarly articles, academic journals, researchers, universities, and scientific concepts. Each entity has a unique QID and properties linking it to other entities, forming a rich knowledge graph.

For academic researchers, Wikidata serves as a powerful tool for bibliometric analysis, disambiguation of author names, mapping institutional relationships, and linking scholarly outputs across different identifier systems (DOI, ORCID, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, etc.). The SPARQL query service provides a flexible, standards-based interface for complex graph queries.

The Wikidata Query Service is entirely free, requires no authentication, and supports the full SPARQL 1.1 query language. It is especially powerful for cross-referencing scholarly metadata that spans multiple databases and identifier systems.

Authentication

No authentication is required. The Wikidata SPARQL endpoint is free and open.

# No API key needed -- set a descriptive User-Agent header as courtesy
curl -G "https://query.wikidata.org/sparql" \
  --data-urlencode "query=SELECT ?item WHERE { ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 } LIMIT 5" \
  -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -H