Welcome to the Wikidata Query Service tutorial!
We hope you get a lot out of this tutorial and start using the powerful SPARQL query language to retrieve, modify, and make the best use of Wikidata.
SPARQL (pronounced “sparkle”) stands for “SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language”. This acronym refers to an RDF query language, that is, a query language for databases that store data in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. Wikidata is a database of this type.
This tutorial aims to give you a friendly introduction to SPARQL so you can learn to query Wikidata even if you have no background in writing queries or programming languages. Each chapter contains lessons that teach various principles of SPARQL, using examples and exercises. We strongly recommend you try and do the exercises and not just jump to the solution.
By the end of the tutorial you will be able to use SPARQL to query the huge amount of linked data available on Wikidata. We hope this will encourage you to become an active editor on Wikidata – the world’s largest free database.