Wikidata: Wikipedia Game-changer

But whatever your opinions of Wikipedia politics, it’s hard to deny the technical achievements of the project. Masses of information in dozens of different languages, organised into cross-referenced articles, complemented with multiple media and all available freely at the click of a mouse. It should come as no surprise then that Wikipedia struggles with problems of a technical kind too. One particularly big headache comes from the structure (or lack thereof) of the information that populates its pages. The minimal existing structure tends to make the maintenance of all those gigabytes of data very laborious indeed. But Wikidata, a recently launched initiative being worked on by the German Wikimedia chapter, aims to ease this burden. Its tagline is no less than ‘A Game-changer for Wikipedia and Beyond’.