A Wikipedia for Data

Bret Taylor suggested having a Wikipedia for Data. It’s not a novel idea, considering that Freebase is up and I have meddled around with a similar idea concept that I submitted to Y-combinator earlier.

Adrian Holovaty, founder of web framework Django and programmer-journalist, also suggested something similar when he proposed a radical approach for newspaper sites to evolve from a story-centric style of news reporting to a data-driven approach.

The main barrier for a “data-driven Wikipedia” will be the privacy issues when data concerning contact information is up – But I don’t think anyone can stop that from happening.

We need a Wikipedia for data – Bret Taylor’s blog

Imagine what amazing applications would be created if every programmer in the world had free access to all of these data sets:

* Map data for all countries in a relatively uniform data format

* White pages data (names and addresses) for all cities of the world

* Stock data for all major exchanges for all time

* Movie showtimes data for all cities in the world

* Television schedule data for all cities in the world

* Sports scores and stats for all sports in the world for all time

* Rich meta data for all musical albums and movies from all labels for all time