In December the Semantic Web Blog spoke with Wikidata project director Denny Vrandecic about progress on Phase 1 of the work to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines (see story here). At the time, Vrandecic explained that January would begin the roll-out of language-by-language editions – first up were Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian – on the Wikipedias.

Last week brought another language on board, as Wikidata Phase 1 went live on English Wikipedia, with Wikidata language links supplementing locally-hosted ones there too.  March 6 should see deployment to the Wikipedias that do not have language links.

In an important update, Phase 2 of the overall effort to centralize access to and management of structured data – which was in development as Phase 1 progressed – saw its first fruits for use on Wikidata.org (not yet on Wikipedia) earlier this month: Infoboxes.

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Ever heard of the Finnish television series Matkaoppaat? It’s a program about tour guides abroad – something of a reality show that looks like it has already spawned copycat programs with more on the way in other countries.

But of more interest to readers of The Semantic Web Blog is that just a couple of days ago, the series was added as item Q1000000 to Wikidata, on the heels of other recent entries like the English town Newton-le-Willows (item ID Q750000) and American alpine skier Tim Jitloff (ID Q500000). They’re following in the footsteps of earlier items like Dutch Wikipedia (ID Q10000), which was added just four days after Wikidata was launched on Oct. 30.

“Right now the system is launched (since end of October) and people and bots are filling it,” says Wikidata project director Denny Vrandecic, of the Wikimedia Foundation’s effort to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

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There was a lot of hoopla over the last week over Wikipedia’s 10-year anniversary. But we here at The Semantic Web also want to note an event that may get more modest coverage from the traditional media outlets, and that is today’s release of DBpedia 3.6, based on Wikipedia dumps dating from October and November 2010.

That brings the queryable Wikipedia information set up to more than 3.5 million things described, with 1.67 million of them classified in a consistent ontology that includes 364,000 persons, 462,000 places, 99,000 music albums, 54,000 films, 16,500 video games, 148,000 organizations, 148,000 species and 5,200 diseases. Its 672-million RDF triples-strong dataset boasts 286 million extractions from the English Wikipedia and 386 million from other language editions and links to external datasets.

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