I am truly and deeply amazed by the Wikidata community.

A bit more than a year ago, I moved to Berlin and assembled a fantastic team of people to help realize a vision. Today, we have collected millions of statements, geographical locations, points in time, persons and their connections, creative works, and species - and every single minute, hundred of edits are improving and changing this knowledge base that anyone can edit, that anyone can use for free.

So much more is left to do, and the further we go, the more opportunities open. More datatypes - links are on the horizon, quantities will be a major step. I can hardly wait to see Wikidata answer queries. And there are so many questions unanswered - what does the community need in order to maintain Wikidata best? Which tools, reports, special pages are needed? What is the right balance between automation and flexibility?

Besides Wikipedia, Wikidata can be used in many other places. We just started the conversations about sister projects, but also external projects are expected to become smarter thanks to Wikidata. I expect tools and libraries and patterns for these type of uses will emerge in the next few months, and applications will become more intelligent and act more informed, powered by Wikidata.

A project like Wikidata needs in its early days a strong, sometimes stubborn leader in order to accelerate its growth. But at some point a project gathers sufficient momentum, and the community moves faster than any single leader could lead, and suddenly they might become bottlenecks, and instead of accelerating the project the might be stalling it.

Wikidata has reached the point where it is time for me to step down. The Wikidata development team in Berlin will, in the upcoming weeks and months, set up processes that allow the community, that I learned to trust even more during that year, to take over the reigns. I will stay with the team until the end of September, and then become again what I have been for the last decade - a normal and proud member of the Wikimedia communities.

I also would like to use this chance to reveal a secret. Wikidata items are identified by a Q, followed by a number, Wikidata properties by a P, followed by a number. Whereas it is obvious that the P stands for property, some of you have asked - why Q? My answer was, that Q not only looks cool, but also makes for great identifiers, and hopefully a certain set of people will some day associate a number like Q9036 with something they can look up in Wikidata. But the true reason is that Q is the first letter of the name of the woman I love. We married last year, among all that Wikidata craziness, and I am thankful to her for the patience she had while I was discussing whether to show wiki identifiers or language keys, what bugs to prioritize when, and which calendar systems were used in Sweden.

I will continue to be a community member with Wikidata. My new day job, though, will be at Google, and from there I hope to continue to effectively further our goals towards a world where everyone has access to the sum of all knowledge.

Sincerely,

Denny Vrandečić

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Project director Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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