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-freebase-is.html

On 16 December 2014 at 20:30, Denny Vrandečić <vrandecic@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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