What is the role of Wikidata in supporting a Wikipedia page?

Wikidata is a free, structured knowledge database maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation and run by the same broader community as Wikipedia. For reputation work, Wikidata matters for two compounding reasons. First, it is one of the primary inputs to Google’s Knowledge Graph, so improvements to the Wikidata entry flow into the Knowledge Panel directly. Second, AI engines use Wikidata for entity disambiguation, so a clean Wikidata entry with proper identifiers and sameAs links improves how the engines recognize and describe the entity. Wikipedia and Wikidata are maintained together; getting one right without the other leaves value on the table.