The Next Big Step For Wikidata: Forming a Hub For Researchers

The ed17 writes Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. ... This proposal is significant because no other open collaborative project ... can connect the free databases in the world across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. ...the project will be capable of providing a unique open service: for the first time, that will allow both citizens and professional scientists from any research or language community to integrate their databases into an open global structure, to publicly annotate, verify, criticize and improve the quality of available data, to define its limits, to contribute to the evolution of its ontology, and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.

Comments

oh great, empire building at wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia started out as a web site where volunteers could edit articles, before entry into the nupedia website. nupedia is now dead. wikipedia has been engaging in bigger fund raising drives, and has more paid employees. Now it is trying to do more stuff to justify those more employees, just like when wikipedia spent a bunch of money trying to develop better wikipedia page editing software. I bet the heads of wikipedia now have bigger salaries.

I would just like the number of humans maintaining wikipedia to be small once again, and not try to do anything else.

Re:EU grant

[JanneM]

They have four partner universities and several other research institutions, most or all of who already have one or more full-time staff dedicated to help projects with their grant application process.

Yes, EU grant applications are big and cumbersone - though the payoff is commensurate - but the process is not going to be the main hurdle. With all the available expertise at their disposal, if they can't navigate the application process then they're unlikely to successfully steer a major project over several years either.