WikibaseSync - Tutorial

This is a short guide that shows you the functionality that WikibaseSync offers. The objective of WikibaseSync is to reuse items and properties of Wikidata in your own Wikibase. Imagine for example you want to model knowledge about people working at 'The QA Company'. We do not want to reinvent the concept of human, as well as properties like gender, nationality, birth date. Let's start ....

Imagine we want to describe "Jonathan Mallet", an IT engineer working at "The QA Company". First we would create a new entity:

Now we want to add new properties. Let's say we want to say that he studied at the University Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne. We want neither reinvent the property "educated at", nor the "University Jean Monnet". If we add a statement and search for "educated" we will be proposed to clone the property from Wikidata and to use it. As we are used in Wikidata we will select this property and continue composing our statement. Easy no!?!

Similarly we do with the University Jean Monnet:

This way we have create a new entity in our wikibase and described it reusing property and instances in Wikidata. Nice! 😊

Finally let's consider another case. Also "Pierre Maret" is working for "The QA Company" but he already has an entry in Wikidata, i.e. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q47536210. If we search in this Wikibase for "Pierre Maret" we will get:

By clicking in the search we also can trigger a clone and get:

Note that we create a link pointing to Wikidata. So we always know to which entity in Wikidata it corresponds to. By clicking on "sync" we get:

Note: This may take some time since we need to copy quite a bit of data from Wikidata

And not only this. If the entity is updated in Wikidata, by clicking again "sync" the new statements will be added and the removed one will be deleted! So they will be in sync!

Now you know also why the tool is called WikibaseSync 😊