I agree that Mark has written a nice article, but I disagree with some of his conclusions, as you can find in my comment on the page (alas, not permalinkable). Andreas, do you think that it is easier to monopolise and manipulate information on Wikidata, visible to potentially many editors and users coming from different backgrounds, than it would be in a Wikipedia language edition with a small number of active editors? I.e. do you think that Wikidata *increases* that danger, or merely does not improve the situation, or maybe even has the chance of leading to a less likely to be manipulated system? Cheers, Denny 2012/4/11 Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Eisenacher Straße 2 | 10777 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.

On 11 April 2012 11:25, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: It also fixes the whole death anomalies thing: if someone dies, we can update the Wikidata entry, rather than having conflicting information on different language versions of Wikipedia. I would think some of our more fanatical BLP adherents would rather like that. ;-) Of course, I think the primary thing for me with Wikidata is the uses that it can be put to that don't actually involve Wikipedia. Governments are putting out thousands of datasets: complex spreadsheets with often confusing or obscure information about the societies we live in. Having a central place to store and improve that information is something people have been trying to imagine for a while: projects like CKAN and LinkedGov. It'd be interesting if we could get a productive, drama-free community of people to maintain and curate public government data, as this would enable all sorts of usage both inside and outside the Wikimedia projects. "Data driven journalism" is something that's actually flourishing pretty well without much in the way of open source and free culture, it'd be interesting from a long-range strategic kind of view how the Wikimedia projects fit in. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/>

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 04:46:50PM -0700, En Pine wrote: We're making plenty of positive progress, but we do have to keep our eyes open for (potential) pernicious potholes in the road. If someone shouts "look out", we should definitely stop and look, just to be sure. ;-) sincerely, Kim Bruning