Why the term “snak” keeps appearing in the Wikidata API
This is one of those terms I kept seeing in API responses and documentation, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what it means. I found an explanation in the Wikibase/DataModel docs:
For lack of a better name, any such basic assertion that one can make in Wikidata is called a Snak (which is small, but more than a byte). This term will not be relevant for using Wikidata (editors will not encounter it), but it is relevant for developers to avoid confusion with Statements or other claims.
However, an anonymous commenter on Help talk:Wikidata datamodel offers an alternative theory:
Snak stands for “some note about knowledge”
I can’t find other references to that phrase, so I wonder if it’s a backronym. (Although Wikidata discussion pages don’t seem to be indexed by Google, so maybe I’m missing them.)