Hoi,
It is an assumption that Wikidata will not expect data from Freebase. It
has not been discussed, it may be correct. However, there are many really
important reasons why we should seriously consider the offer of accepting
much data from Freebase for inclusion in Wikidata.
The most important reason is that our aim is to share in the sum of all
knowledge. I am not convinced at all that the data in Freebase is of a
lesser quality than Wikidata. If it is of the same quality or better, we
deny our users this wealth of information. Now who wants to seriously
accept that argument.
Google throws its weight behind the tooling of sourcing statements. This
means that it is not abandoning the data in Freebase. It is not abandoning
structured data at all. It wants better data, more data and Wikidata is the
place for it..
I am extremely happy with this news but I do not accept the idea that we
should not accept Freebase data without some proper discussion and soul
searching.
Remember: perfection is the enemy of the good.
Thanks,
GerardM
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2014/12/google-what-it-does-with-freebas…
On 16 December 2014 at 20:30, Denny Vrandečić <vrandecic(a)google.com> wrote:
Freebase was launched to be a “Wikipedia for structured data”, because in
2007 there was no such project. But now we do have Wikidata, and Wikidata
and its community is developing very fast. Today, the goals of Freebase
might be better served by supporting Wikidata [1].
Freebase has seen a huge amount of effort go into it since it went public
in 2007. It makes a lot of sense to make the results of this work available
to Wikidata. But knowing Wikidata and its community a bit, it is obvious
that we can not and should not simply upload Freebase data to Wikidata:
Wikidata would prefer the data to be referenced to external, primary
sources.
In order to do so, Google will soon start to work on an Open Source tool
which will run on Wikimedia labs and which will allow Wikidata contributors
to find references for a statement and then upload the statement and the
reference to Wikidata. We will release several sets of Freebase data ready
for consumption by this tool under a CC0 license. This tool should also
work for statements already in Wikidata without sufficient references, or
for other datasets, like DBpedia and other machine extraction efforts, etc.
To make sure we get it right, we invite you to participate in the design
and development of this tool here:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Primary sources tool
I hope you are as excited as I am about this project, and I hope that you
will join me in making this a reality. I am looking forward to your
contributions!
[1]
https://plus.sandbox.google.com/109936836907132434202/posts/bu3z2wVqcQc
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