Dear Gerard:

...

This is the essence of Wikidata. After that we can all complain about
the fallacies of Wikidata.. I have my pet pieves and it is not your RDF
SPARQL and stuff. That is mostly stuff for academics and it its use is
largely academic and not useful on the level where I want progress.
Exposing this information to PEOPLE is what I am after and by and large
they do not live in the ivory towers where RDF and SPARQL live.

It seems that, in this bright future, you are forgetting our past. Those very "ivory towers" that you so scold are where Wikidata has been conceived. RDF is the reason why we have properties as first-class objects in Wikidata. Even before such technical "details", the vision of a Semantic Web that enables the free exchange of information beyond system boundaries for Denny and myself has been the first and foremost inspiration for much of the work that went into preparing and realizing Wikidata. Surely not all of Wikidata came from this one source of inspiration -- e.g., the crucial insight that all of this should be in a single multilingual site is due to Erik Moeller -- but without all of the work in semantic technologies we would not have Wikidata today.

People from different backgrounds are working together here. If you want to be part of such a community, you should abandon outdated stereotypes, and in particular stop using "academic" as a pejorative.

Markus

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