I want to live in an alternative timeline where RDF was never adopted by wikidata but instead created something that solved its specific problems in a human friendly manner. People always point to wikidata as a succesful semantic web project but fail to imagine how much more awesome it could have been. First off, wikidata has little use for ontologies outside of its own domain because all the types are modeled as dynamic second order concepts. Meaning, people organise knowledge using web pages and those webpages are used to structure other knowledge.

A simple Sparql query for wikidate would look something like this

    select *
    where {
        ?item wdt:Qe23oieke wd:Ert923Ee3451 .
        service wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" }
    }

This incomprehensible nonsense is the result of two choices: 1) It had to be language independent because you know the world is bigger than just the anglosphere. 2) It had to be "machine readable", because then the computer can work together in harmony.

Putting the cart before the horse, or in this case the machine before the man.

Wikidata was consciously designed without consideration for the semantic web/rdf. I remember being dismayed by this, but they added some facilities later. It is designed around a purpose built data model. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel

Wikidata builds on RDF at its core (the data model behind JSON-LD), and also supports queries with responses in JSON-LD format.

It’s always wikidata.