On Sat, Jan 6, 2018 at 9:53 AM Brill Lyle <wp.brilllyle@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes. This is the crux of the matter, the big question: "I'm not sure we should store this kind of data on Wikidata."

So, I miss the ideas and mantra we had in Freebase. "some data is better than no data".  It really was FREE in the sense that editathons or curators or researchers could actually use Freebase to begin storing their data collection.  Freebase had the same worries.  And we solved it quite easily and built up a wonderful community of lists, data in the making, partial projects, etc.  Just like Black Lunch Table is doing now.  The solution was introducing a very simple idea of a "namespace".  Everyone and every project could have their own slice of Freebase and anyone could ask permission from the namespace owner to help edit or curate.  Our search and API allowed you to filter out non-root namespaces if you wanted or filter ON THEM.  My personal namespace was /thadguidry.  And it is there to this day in the data dumps where you can see all my curated data and lists.  We monitored namespaces for simple violations like racism, human dignity data violations, etc., but left it free and open in the sense that "some data is better than no data".  It resulted in the amassing of over 500,000,000 namespace facts and they are still used to this day to enrich "less than notable" entities where many of those "less than notable/popular?" facts actually show up in Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, & Google and where researchers, and students have used those facts to enlighten the world and make it a better place.

It would be AMAZING, if somehow, this year in 2018...that namespaces could actually be used in Wikidata to make it truly free and open to all.  /blacklunchtable to start.

-Thad