Yandex gives a €150K grant to Wikidata

A non-profit project Wikidata, an editable database created by Wikimedia Foundation, has received a grant of €150K from Russian Internet company Yandex.

Wikidata is a new project of Wikimedia Foundation, a co-editable knowledge base. The base is used to provide centralized storage of structured data that can be contained in Wikipedia articles - for example, interwiki linking or statistical information: birth dates, population, etc. These data can be used in Wikipedia and other projects, including those unrelated to Wikimedia. Anyone can make changes to the data available in over 300 languages.

Yandex Company project manager Alexander Shubin says: We all used to think that the Internet is a set of text pages, links and multimedia. The study of these pages and links between them started decades ago. However, people are much more accustomed to think in terms of objects - people, things, and events. The problem of studying objects and their interactions is much more difficult than studying web page interactions.

We are confident that Wikidata will eventually become as demanded as Wikipedia, and will help to create the most complete object database. This will allow making a qualitative leap in the interaction between man and existing services, as well as creating a platform for fundamentally new services in the Internet and other fields.