Hi all,

Talk about causes is ubiquitous in everyday life and many other domains of knowledge.  Until recently, we've had a few properties to make statements about cause in certain narrow areas, but lacked a way to structure data about causes across a broad range of subjects.  For example, you might want to know:
  • What caused World War II?
  • What causes evolution?
  • What causes malaria?
  • What causes bread to rise?
  • What causes rust?
  • What causes gravity?
  • What causes rainbows?
Wikidata now has some new properties that provide structure for basic answers to such questions.
  • has cause (alias: has underlying cause): thing that ultimately resulted in the effect [1]
  • has immediate cause: thing that proximately resulted in the effect [2]
  • has contributing factor: thing that significantly influenced the effect, but did not directly cause it [3]

This approach to modeling causation attempts to balance expressiveness with simplicity.  It borrows from the idea of causation as a "chain of events", which also has background conditions or events that set the stage for some outcome.  These properties are not perfect, but they do allow us to capture much richness in how various sources talk about causes -- and to do so in a way that humans can easily understand. 

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Modeling_causes explains these properties, their background, examples, things to avoid, issues and context.  Please comment on the 'Help:Modeling causes' talk page, or here, with any feedback.

Hopefully we'll be able to build some cool stuff with this.

Cheers,
Eric

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Emw

1. has cause.  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P828
2. has immediate cause.  https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1478
3. has contributing factor. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1479