How to Use the Wikidata Fact Box

The Wikidata fact box appears beside the Wikipedia panel whenever you click an entity in the 3D knowledge graph. Where Wikipedia shows you prose, Wikidata shows you a scannable card: image, label, curated key-value facts, authority links, and a deep link back to the canonical record. This guide covers the panel’s states, the disambiguation flow, and the offline behavior.

Prerequisites

A vault with a built knowledge graph
Internet access on the first lookup for each entity (subsequent clicks are cached)
No setup needed — the fact box ships enabled by default

Open the fact box

Click any node in the 3D knowledge graph view. Two panels appear in the top-left corner of the canvas:

Wikipedia (violet icon) — a list of matching articles
Wikidata (amber icon) — the fact box for the most likely QID

The panels load independently. The fact box shows a spinner with “Finding entity…” while resolution runs, then “Loading facts…” while the entity payload is fetched, then the rendered card.

Understand the fact box layout

When resolution succeeds, the panel renders in four stacked sections:

Header

A thumbnail (from Wikidata’s P18 “image” property, served via Commons)
The canonical label in your UI language
The one-line description from Wikidata
A QID badge that opens wikidata.org/wiki/Q… in a new tab

Grouped facts

Curated per entity type. Example for a person:

Life — date of birth, date of death, place of birth, place of death, citizenship
Career — occupation, educated at, employer, doctoral advisor, influenced by
Relations — spouse, child
Recognition — awards received, notable works

Dates are formatted with precision respected: day when Wikidata has it, month or year when the record is less specific. Multi-value properties (e.g., two citizenships) are joined with a middle-dot separator.

External IDs

A row of small chips for known authority records. Clickable ones open the external service directly:

VIAF, ORCID, ISNI — scholarly and name authority IDs
IMDB, MusicBrainz — entertainment
GitHub, Twitter — online identity
GND, LoC — library catalogs

Attribution footer

A single line: “Data from Wikidata · CC0”, with a link to the Wikidata entity page.

Pick the right entity when the name is ambiguous

Common names produce multiple candidates. When the resolver is not confident enough to auto-select, the panel switches to a picker:

A short “Multiple matches — pick one:” header
Up to 5 candidate rows, each showing: label, description, QID, confidence score
Click any row to commit

Your pick is cached for 30 days and keyed on the entity text + ontology type. The next time the same entity appears in any vault with the same type, it resolves instantly to your chosen QID.

If you later realise the pick was wrong, clicking the node again currently re-loads the cached choice. Clearing browser storage for the extension resets all resolutions.

Work with different entity types

Daneel maps your knowledge graph’s ontology labels to Wikidata’s class hierarchy so the reconciliation stage can filter candidates by type. Five pillars are recognized out of the box:

Person — labels like person, human, fictional_character, deity
Organization — organization, company, university, political_party, sports_team, news_outlet
Place — location, country, city, region, continent, body_of_water, mountain, building, monument
Creative work — book, film, song, album, artwork, television_show, video_game
Event — war, battle, election, revolution, treaty, conference

Custom ontology labels that don’t match any of the above still work: the reconciliation runs without a type filter, candidates come back ranked by label match, and the disambiguation picker shows top results.

Use the panel offline

The fact box is gated by Offline Mode. When the switch is on:

Cached entities still render. If you looked up Einstein yesterday and his payload is still fresh in chrome.storage, the fact box loads normally from cache, no network needed.
New lookups show a paused notice. Clicking a node whose QID has never been resolved shows “OFFLINE MODE — Wikidata lookup is paused”.
External ID chips still link. The chip URLs open wikidata.org and authority sites in a new tab; the extension itself issues no outbound call.

To pre-warm the cache before going offline, click through the entities you want to have ready while online.

Rate-limit behavior

All calls to Wikidata and the reconciliation service share a three-slot concurrency limit. If you rapidly click through a dozen nodes, no more than three network requests run at a time. The rest queue silently.

If Wikimedia responds with a 429 (rate limited), the panel respects the Retry-After header and retries up to three times with exponential backoff. On repeated 429s the panel shows “Couldn’t reach Wikidata” — wait a minute and try again.

Cache lifetimes

Three separate caches keep the panel responsive:

Resolutions (text + type → QID): 30 days for user-confirmed picks, 1 day for auto-selected
Entity payloads (QID → full simplified claims): 7 days
Label map (QID or property ID → human-readable label): LRU-capped at 5,000 entries, untimed

Labels change rarely, so the map grows monotonically across sessions until you hit the cap.

Close the panel

Click the X in the panel header to dismiss the fact box. The Wikipedia panel stays open independently — you can dismiss either, both, or neither.

Closing the 3D graph view or switching documents clears the panel automatically.

Language

Version 1 is English only. The label on your node is resolved against English Wikidata labels, the fact box renders in English, and the cache is lang-unaware. Multilingual support is tracked for a later release.

For background on how resolution works — reconciliation with a type filter, running in parallel with the general entity search, merged and thresholded — see Entity Resolution.

Next steps

For the broader 3D graph exploration workflow, see How to Explore Your Knowledge Graph.
For how entities are extracted from your documents in the first place, see Knowledge Graphs.
For the offline-mode rules that gate the panel, see Offline Mode.