Dear Martynas,
I strongly disagree that the provenance statements should be removed
from the default responses, since it is exactly the provenance that makes
Wikidata so valuable. Wikidata comes with a lot of noise, since often
references are not provided. Personally, I mostly consider a Wikidata
statement without a reference, without any value and is best ignored. . So
if we remove the provenance, Wikidata becomes just a bag of noise.
Having said this, I do acknowledge that wikidata comes with a lot of
baggage or weight, but there are some decent tools out there to subset
Wikidata into more manageable portions.
We did a paper on that a few years back:
https://www.semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj3491.pdf
Cheers,
Andra
Op di 6 jan 2026 om 11:15 schreef Martynas Jusevičius <
[email protected]>:
> Hi all,
>
> I hope this is the right place for this discussion :)
>
> First of all, as developer of software for RDF Linked Data
> consumption, I am naturally delighted that Wikidata serves Linked Data
> and supports content negotiation (not many services get it right).
>
> However, IMO, the amount of meta-triples not relevant to the requested
> entity, and the sheer size of the RDF data that it causes, make
> Wikidata's RDF responses pretty much unusable.
>
> Let's take a single entity as an example:
>
> curl -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" '
> https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1748'
>
> The size of the Turtle response is 1.6MB!
>
> All of the schema metadata such as property and class descriptions are
> not needed as they can be discovered by dereferencing the respective
> term URIs:
>
> wdno:P2960 a owl:Class ;
> owl:complementOf _:e8842935d39a233def3d267ae3737d8c .
>
> _:e8842935d39a233def3d267ae3737d8c a owl:Restriction ;
> owl:onProperty wdt:P2960 ;
>
> owl:someValuesFrom owl:Thing .
>
> p:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> psv:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> pqv:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> prv:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> wdt:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> ps:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> pq:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
> pr:P518 a owl:ObjectProperty .
>
> wd:Q1775415 a wikibase:Item ;
> rdfs:label "feminine"@en ;
> skos:prefLabel "feminine"@en ;
> schema:name "feminine"@en ;
> schema:description "grammatical gender"@en .
>
> and so on and so forth.
>
> Then I would argue that the provenance statements such as
> <
> http://www.wikidata.org/entity/statement/Q1748-cfb94fd5-464b-1b83-a513-dd751882b7ce
> >
> are also *not* necessary for the majority of use cases of the majority
> of users.
>
> I suppose they are included to provide a complete and "truthy"
> response, but by doing so the usability of the data is diminished. I
> think the provenance statements should be removed from the default
> responses and relegated to some "complete" or "truthy" profile with a
> distinct URI, linked to from the default response.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Martynas
> atomgraph.com
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