The Wikipedia panel that pops up when you click a node in the knowledge graph is great for reading.

It is less great when you just want to check a date, confirm an affiliation, or follow an authority link to ORCID. Prose is not a spreadsheet.

Wikidata is. Every QID is a small, structured record: birth date, employer, awards, country of citizenship, external IDs in a hundred different authority databases. Today the graph view starts using it.

What you see

Click a node. Wikipedia opens on the left, exactly like before. Beside it, a new amber-tinted panel loads: a thumbnail, the canonical label, the one-line description, and a tight stack of facts grouped by theme.

For a person you get life dates, place of birth and death, citizenship, occupation, where they studied, who employed them, who their doctoral advisor was, who they influenced. Dates are formatted properly, with precision respected, "March 1879" if that is all Wikidata has, "14 March 1879" when the day is known.

For an organization: founding date, founder, headquarters, industry, CEO. For a place: country, parent region, population, coordinates. For a creative work: author or director, publication date, genre, language.

At the bottom, a row of small chips: VIAF, ORCID, ISNI, IMDB, MusicBrainz, GitHub, Twitter. Each one links to the authoritative external record when Wikidata has it.

Getting the right entity

"Einstein" is unambiguous. "Paris" is not. "Feynman" returns three physicists and a mathematician.

The panel handles this quietly. Every click triggers a parallel lookup through two services: the Wikidata reconciliation API, which takes the entity type from your ontology as a filter, and the plain Wikidata search, which does not. The results get merged, scored, and the top candidate is shown directly when confidence is high.

When two or more candidates are too close to call, the panel switches to a picker: label, description, QID, confidence. You choose once, we remember your pick. The next time that same entity appears in any vault, it resolves instantly.

Under the hood, briefly

  • Every request carries a descriptive User-Agent per Wikimedia policy, routed through the service worker so headers are actually set (content scripts cannot).
  • A shared concurrency limit caps all Wikimedia calls at three in flight, so a node-mashing session does not get us rate-limited.
  • Retry-After headers are honoured with exponential backoff. If Wikimedia is having a bad day, the panel degrades gracefully.
  • Three caches: resolved QIDs by text plus type, full entity payloads by QID, a shared label map. Cold click hits the network, warm clicks render instantly.
  • Offline Mode gates everything. When the switch is on, the panel shows a paused notice for uncached entities, and still renders fact boxes for anything you looked up earlier.

Privacy

The panel ships with a reference telemetry integration that doubles as the template for our broader analytics work landing next week. The rules we held to:

  • No entity text in any event. The specific concepts you are browsing stay in your vault.
  • No QIDs in events either. A QID identifies an entity as clearly as its name.
  • Only categorical values, counts, durations, booleans. Nothing free-form ever leaves.
  • Consent-gated at the service layer. Call sites emit unconditionally, a disabled sink drops silently.

Everything we track is about the pipeline itself, cache hit rate, resolution confidence distribution, rate-limit events, not about what you look up.

What is next

This is v1. Under the same abstraction, the v2 work already sits in the codebase: SPARQL methods on the client, contract-tested, dormant. The next step is batch queries across every resolved QID in your vault, extracting real factual edges, Einstein died in Princeton, Feynman studied at MIT, the Curies were married, and rendering them as a distinct layer in the 3D graph alongside the co-occurrence links you already see.

In v1 the panel is English only, because Wikidata's English coverage is the best starting point and cache namespaces are lang-unaware for now. Multilingual display is tracked for a later release.

Click any node today. The facts are there.