Wikidata:Tours/Inception dates

Welcome to Wikidata! This tour will take you through the steps for adding an inception date to items. Adding an a date of inception is important as it lets people know exactly when something began or started and allows it to be displayed on timelines, in Wikipedia articles and any other websites which use Wikidata.

If there are any terms in this tour you would like a definition for please see the Wikidata:Glossary.

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Please note that the page in the background is only a replica of a real page — you can think of it as a sandbox for you to play in and try new things. Your changes won't appear on Wikidata so there's no need to worry while making edits in this space. Let's get started!

The first thing we need to do is to find the inception date for an item we want to add it to. There are many places you can find the inception date e.g an official websites. Wikidata encourages people to add the most specific inception date available e.g 1st December 2011, instead of just 2011, but simply a year, a decade or even a century is acceptable if no more detailed information is available.

In this example we will be adding the inception date for the item for National Museum of Anthropology (Q524249): national museum of Mexico. We will give you the inception date as part of the tour.

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Reminder: An item refers to a page in Wikidata about a real-world object, concept or something else, it includes information about the topic and has a unique identity. If you'd like to know more about items please take the Items Tour.

More information on reliable sources is available at Help:Sources and Wikidata:Verifiability.

All item pages have a statements section which can include any number of rows containing different things — words, numbers, even image files. This may look complicated but it's fairly straightforward. Let's take a closer look at one of these rows now.

We add the inception to an item by adding a statement about it. To start adding a statement click on the + add statement button

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Reminder: A statement is a piece of data about an item, recorded on the item's page. A statement consists of a claim If you'd like to learn more about statements please take the Statements Tour (add link).

In the box type start typing and click the option for:

inception (time when an entity begins to exist; for date of official opening use P1619)

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Reminder: A property describes the data value of a statement and can be thought of as a category of data, for example "color" for the data value "blue". Properties, when paired with values, form a statement in Wikidata. Properties are also used in qualifiers. Properties have their own pages on Wikidata and are connected to items, resulting in a linked data structure. If you'd like to know more about items please take the Properties Tour (coming soon).

In this box add the most detailed information available, in this case Encyclopedia Britannica states the inception date as:

1825

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Note: to learn more about statements you can take the Statements Tour from Wikidata:Tours

Reminder: A Q number is Wikidata's unique identifier for an item. If you'd like to learn more about Q numbers please take the Q numbers Tour (coming soon).

The next step is to record where you got this information from, to do this click + add reference

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Reminder: A Reference describes the origin of a statement in Wikidata. A reference is often an item, for example, a book. If you'd like to know more about references please take the References Tour at Wikidata:Tours. .

In the box type start typing and click the option for:

reference URL (should be used for Internet URLs as references. Use "Wikimedia import URL" (P4656) for imports from WMF sites)

Paste into the box the URL the information comes from, in this case:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/National-Museum-of-Anthropology

The final thing to do is to publish this information on Wikidata, to do this simply click ✓ publish.

Congratulations! You've completed the Inception Tour.

You can now add inception dates to Wikidata items to make them more useful for everyone.

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Want to keep learning? Click here to return to the tours portal.

Still have questions? Talk to someone over live chat on IRC #wikidata^connect or check out the following pages for help:

• Wikidata's Help portal
• The Wikidata glossary
• Project chat, for discussing any and all aspects of Wikidata