[Wikimedia-l] Wikidata opinion piece in The Atlantic

[Tom Morris]

On 11 April 2012 11:25, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is interesting that people consider the potential negative aspects and
> forgets about the positive.
>
> For me the big thing is that translatable info boxes is a perfect method of
> populating relevant information in stub articles. This is of particular
> relevance to the smaller Wikipedias, the projects where people are actively
> building something up. I noticed on the Zulu Wikipedia that they are
> working hard on doing something like this. Being able to translate the
> labels, some words relating to the content.
>

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/>