[Wikidata-l] A personal note, and a secret - Wikidata

11 Jul 2013

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

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

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