The term document has already come up a few times while discussing what a Wikibase entity is, and if that should change (be that in name only, code or structures), including in my first post of this series.
Looking at the very first definition of entity in the duck duck go search that I performed 6 seconds ago, an entity is:
Something that exists as a particular and discrete unit.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
At the most basic level, it’s fairly straightforward to say that a Wikibase doesn’t hold the actual entities (such as a type of tree), rather data about said entities.
And in a nutshell, this data is collected within a document.
Quoting a few choice people again, before diving deeper into this topic…
The “entities” in the Wikibase base are not Entities. They are descriptions of entities. The entity is the thing in the world not the data we have about it, even tough colloquially, we don’t make the distinction. But we have separate URIs for the thing and the description in the abstract and for specific renderings.
Daniel Kinzler in conversation, June 2024
I think that’s important to mention when discussing what an entity “is”.
The data model chose to use the term “Entity” for the top-level Thing/class in the hierarchy of the data model. But in reality, a better term would have been “Document” or “Record”. In general, the confusion is often due simply to folks that are more familiar with one of the domains than the other, between OOP Objects and Semantic Web Objects.
Thad Guidry in a comment, June 2024