If anyone is looking for slide material for a broad introduction to Wikidata, the deck from yesterday's New York City Wikidata workshop is available at http://www.slideshare.net/_emw/up-and-running-with-wikidata.
There were at least 15 participants (with only a week's notice beforehand), and lots of interest in Wikidata. Wikimedia NYC is a great crowd!
Miscellaneous notes:
- Someone with a big collection of NYC civic / community / OSM data wanted to know how to get information into something like Wikidata. I recommended a separate Wikibase deployment and loading it there, and searching for existing ontologies.
- Someone wanted a way to edit Wikidata using only keyboard shortcuts. It looks like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Tools#Keyboard_shortcuts is the best we've got in that regard. A nice-to-have: keyboard shortcuts baked into the UI, noted via HTML title attributes that display on hover (like the search box at upper right).
- Wikidata Game: classifying humans in native language was easy, making claims about sex/gender was not
- "Why can't we just import all infobox data right now?" A discussion about general vs. specific properties (e.g. "Products"), linguistics, etc. followed. Somewhat of a microcosm of longer-running discussions on Wikidata. Nevertheless, larger-scale creation of properties for infobox parameters would probably be worthwhile.
Eric