As some of you might have heard I started working for Wikimedia Deutschland last month. I have finally settled in my new apartment and found some time to blog.
I am working on an exciting new project called Wikidata and am doing community communications for it. Wikidata will be a free and open knowledgebase that anyone can edit. It will be a place where people can collect statements like that the river Rhine is 1.233 km long. These can then be accessed by all the Wikipedias and can be accessed and used by 3rd party applications as well. For Wikipedia editors it means they will no longer have to update information in all language editions but just in one central place. This should help smaller Wikipedias immensely. If you want to find out more about the project head over to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata. There has been a lot of press coverage last week (techcrunch for example). You can also read the press release and check out the awesome team I’m working with.
What does this mean for KDE? I will still be around and doing board, mentoring programs and community working group work. However I will not be able to work more or less full-time on them any longer. I moved to Berlin so I am at the center of the KDE world and will show up at local meetings 😉 Getting to know the Wikimedia world is great and I’m sure I’ll have some lessons to share soon.
Congrats to your new job, and I hope you enjoy it! 🙂
So, both Semantic Wikipedia and FreeBase (a google product). Both have the same objectives, Google’s Freebase already have an enormous head start. Curiously Google is also sponsoring this!???
Of course this is good move, but why NIH syndrome?
Congratulations Lydia, you deserve it 🙂