Regarding Paul's comment:
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I first heard about Wikidata at SemTech in San Francisco and I was told very directly that they were not interested in working with anybody who was experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users because they had worked so hard to get academic positions and get a grant from the Allen Institute and it is more cost-effective and more compatible with academic advancement to hire a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will follow orders.
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I am, frankly, baffled by this story. It very likely was me, presenting Wikidata at SemTech in SF, so it probably was me you have been talking with, but I have no recollection of a conversation going the way you describe it.
If I remember the timing correctly, I didn't have an academic position at the time of SemTech. Actually, I gave up my academic position to move to Berlin and work on Wikidata.
The donors on Wikidata never exercised any influence on the projects, beyond requiring reports on the progress.
I cannot imagine that I would ever have said that we "were not interested in working with anybody who was experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users", because, really, that would make no sense to say. I also do not remember having gotten an application from you.
Regarding the team that we wanted and eventually did hire, I would sternly disagree with the description of "a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will follow orders" - from the applications we got we choose the most suitable team we could pull together. And considering the discussions we had in the following months, following orders was neither their strength nor the qualification they were chosen for. Nor did they consist only of young people. Instead, it turned out, they were exactly the kind of independent thinkers with dedication to the goal and quality that we were aiming for. Fortunately, for the project.
Maybe the conversation went differently than you are remembering it.
E.g. I would have insisted on building Wikidata on top of MediaWiki (for operational reasons).
E.g. I would have insisted on everyone to work on Wikidata to move to Berlin (because I thought it would be the only possibility to get the project to an acceptable state in the original timeframe, so that we can ensure its future sustainability).
E.g. I would have disagreed on being able to use RDF/SPARQL backends back then out of the box to be Wikidata's backend (but I would have been open for anyone showing me that I was wrong, and indeed very happy because, seriously, I have an unreasonable fondness for SPARQL and RDF).
E.g. I would have disagreed that our job as Wikimedia is to spend too many resource in pretty frontends (because that is something the community can do, and as we see, is doing very well - I think Wikimedia should really concentrate on those pieces of work that cannot and are not being done by the community).
E.g. I would have insisted on not outsourcing any major part of the development effort to an external service provider.
E.g. it could be that we already had all positions filled, and simply no money for more people (really depends on the timing).
So there are plenty of points we might have disagreed with, and which, maybe misunderstood, maybe subtly altered by the passage of time in a fallible memory, have lead to the recollection of our conversation that you presented, but, for the reasons mentioned above, I think that your recollection is incorrect.