Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is backing the Wikidata project, which is part of the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement.
Wikidata is a new project with a big goal. It wants to be a collaboratively edited database of all of the world's knowledge. It will be used to make Wikipedia entries more accurate by sourcing better data. It will also make it easier to manage the 90,000 volunteers.
“Wikidata is ground-breaking. It is the largest technical project ever undertaken by one of the 40 international Wikimedia chapters,” Pavel Richter, CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland, said in a statement.
The technology should also make it easier to group edit lists and charts based on that data, so there's interest from the government, science, and other sectors to use it to publish data under a free Creative Commons license.