Wikidata has been criticised by Wikipedians because the majority of its statements remain unsourced, because discussion of Wikidata entries can only take place in English rather than any of the 250+ language versions of Wikipedia, and because participation in Wikidata requires technical expertise that many Wikipedians do not possess.
It has been difficult for opponents of Wikidata and Google's semantic web activities to articulate exactly what the problem with this loss of provenance is and why it is so important to integrate provenance data when websites share information.
Analysing how cities are represented in the many languages of Wikipedia and tracing a loss of provenance as data is extracted and positioned within Google and Wikidata, we notice the removal of key capabilities.
The first part of the Wikidata project will be to support over 280 language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles of the free encyclopedia.
Wikidata's initial development is being funded with a major donation of EUR1.3m, granted in half by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, while a quarter of Wikidata's initial funding is donated by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through its Science program.
Wikimedia Deutschland added that the Wikidata will be developed in three phases, with the first phase expected to be completed by August 2012.
One of the goals of the relatively new
Wikidata project is to provide such a database of Wikipedia facts.
