Wikidata begins
wikiworks.com/blog/2012/04/02/wikidata-begins
What Jamie wrote
I'm still figuring out Wikidata but from what I understand so far Wikimedia is creating this new project to be similar to MediaWiki Commons. Where commons holds media, Wikidata will hold data. Yaron is one of the guys behind Semantic MediaWiki, which is one of the best ways to put data in a wiki now.
Im very excited about the project, as a MediaWiki and SMW developer, as a data enthusiast, and simply as a Wikipedia user. This project quite different from any of the work that Ive personally been involved with, because Wikipedia is simply a different beast from any standard wiki. There are five challenges that are specific to Wikipedia: its massive, it needs to be extremely fast at all times, its highly multi-lingual (over 200 languages currently), it requires references for all facts (at least in theory), and it has, at this point, no real top-down structure.