Oh I'm very on board; thanks for spreading the good word! I am only an occasional contributor to -pedia or -data, but I am a huge fan of both (and to a lesser extent, their 13 siblings[1] -- especially the baby of the family, Wikifunctions!).

I'm guessing you know this, but for the passerby curious about Wikipedia drama:

Wikidata was founded back in 2012 after Google bought & closed its predecessor[2] to make the now-famous "Google Knowledge Graph". It was continuing a wave of interest in knowledge graphs going back to GOFAI (the "neat"[3] approach to AI), most famously advanced by Lenat's Cyc[4] as a path to intuitive algorithms. We obviously lost that particular war to the "scruffies" for good in 2022, but the well-known problems with LLMs highlight exactly why certain, structured, efficient knowledge graphs are also needed.

The aforementioned drama is that the project to integrate Wikidata into Wikipedia's citations has basically been on pause since 2017 after a lot of arguing[5], and this weekend's scheduled discussion[6] seems passive at best. This comes simply from the fact that the "editors" of Wikipedia--the people who spend countless hours researching content for free following strict rules--don't really care about AI paradigms! Specifically, they find the concept of citing the id of a work as opposed to writing out the whole citation dangerous.

Still, Wikidata is the "fastest growing wiki project" and backs a ton of Wikipedia stuff behind the scenes, such as fancy templates for the infoboxes on the top-right of pages. We've only got 1.65B items compared to Google's AI-curated 500B facts, but I have faith that 2026 will be the year of Wikidata regardless!

After all, is a knowledge base curated with scruffy NLP models until it's incomprehensibly-big still neat? ;)

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/what-we-do/wikimedia-project...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)

[3] [WARNING: 500KB PDF] https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Templates_for_discus...

[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2025/Proposals#Cite...