Query Wikidata for structured knowledge using SPARQL and entity search. Use when: (1) finding structured facts about entities (people, places, organizations), (2) querying relationships between entities, (3) cross-referencing external identifiers (Wikipedia, VIAF, GND, ORCID), (4) building knowledge graphs from linked data. NOT for: full-text article content (use Wikipedia API), scientific literature (use semantic-scholar), geospatial data (use OpenStreetMap).
Query Wikidata's knowledge graph of 100M+ items using SPARQL and the entity search API. Covers people, places, organizations, events, scientific concepts, and their relationships.
Find Wikidata entity IDs by label:
curl -s "https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsearchentities&search=Marie+Curie&language=en&format=json&limit=5" \
| python3 -c "
import sys, json
data = json.load(sys.stdin)
for r in data.get('search', []):
qid = r.get('id', 'N/A')
label = r.get('label', 'N/A')
desc = r.get('description', '')
print(f'{qid:12s} {label} - {desc}')
"