Frequently asked questions

Nicely spotted, yes! OpenSanctions uses Wikidata QIDs for all humans which we've been able to match between both databases. This makes it easy to link up additional data from Wikidata, or other databases which utilise the same identification scheme.

While OpenSanctions does match persons against Wikidata, we don't do the same for other legal entities like companies or organizations. Wikidata talks about corporation as social constructs ("X is a large Russian oil company"), while sanctions apply to these entities in their most strict legal sense, where one corporation is often composed of hundreds or thousands of individual legal entities. Instead of Wikidata, we're matching company records only to other company-centric databases like OpenCorporates.

Read the documentation about identifiers in OpenSanctions.