Adding description

Retrieving an item’s description

As was previously explained in the introduction to Wikidata, each item on Wikidata has a unique Q number. Items also have a label in one or more languages. In addition, an item may also have a description – a short phrase in a particular language. Because item labels are not necessarily unique, the description on a Wikidata item is designed to disambiguate items with the same or similar labels. A description does not need to be unique either; however no two items can have both the same label and the same description.

In WDQS, the string “Description”, like the string “Label”, is a special reserved string for retrieving the description of the item that is specified by the variable name. In other words, if a variable in the SELECT clause is named ?NAMEDescription, then WDQS produces the description for the item in variable ?NAME.

The following query retrieves the films of the Star Wars series, their label and their description.


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