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 _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

Hello, Where is the appropriate place on Wikidata to discuss this? This is big enough for its own WikiProject. Does it already have one somewhere? Should I make one? Actually I just did. <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Freebase> I hardly know what the implications are of this but it seems big enough to have a dedicated place for discussion. Thanks to Denny for whatever role you had in getting access to well-developed data collected by another project. I do not understand that is happening here but it seems like really good news, and I hope someone explains it more.

Hi Gerard, I very much agree. It would be very good to have a discussion on which kind of data can be integrated in which way. One way or the other, one of the most frequent criticisms of Wikidata is a lack of references, which this tool will tackle on the way as well. And at the same time it will allow for a human curation step, which I think is crucial for the Wikidata community to gain ownership of the data. Just dumping everything into Wikidata is, in my opinion, not a sustainable solution. But since the data will be released free, well, the community can decide to do it otherwise, obviously. Cheers, Denny On Wed Dec 17 2014 at 8:40:25 AM Lydia Pintscher < lydia.pintscher(a)wikimedia.de&gt; wrote:

wrote: Hoi, As you know Amir wrote software to compare data in Freebase and Wikidata. Currently there are students working on a similar approach with other sources. Yes, we want sources obviously HOWEVER, the lack of sources should not hold us back from having valid and valuable data. When data can be compared with other sources and it IS the same, it is almost as good as having a source. Obviously data is as good as the source itself. The notion that we should not have data that is from a similar origin as the Wikidata data itself is mind blowingly .... weird ... no excuse for it as far as I am concerned. Our aim is to share the sum of all knowledge and we should honour the hard work that went into Freebase.They are like we are and they deserve recognition and acceptance. In my honest opinion. I would LOVE to have more data in WIkidata. It makes the data that much more useful. I would LOVE to see more work along the lines of the new Google tool, the work of Amir, the work of the students. It is how we validate what we have. There is a lot of problematic data in there and we can find it, highlight it and come to a better approach each time. Thanks, GerardM On 17 December 2014 at 19:04, Denny Vrandečić &lt;vrandecic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l