how any information known about an item is recorded in Wikidata. Formally, they consist of key-value pairs, which match a property (such as "author", or "publication date") with one or more entity values (such as "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" or "1902"). For example, the informal English statement "milk is white" would be encoded by a statement pairing the property with the value under the item .

Statements may map a property to more than one value.