The other day Jared Bernstein, contemplating the Reinhart-Rogoff massacree, was inviting us to note that from an institutional point of view the fact that the peer review issue was less important in the general fiasco than the issue of the openness of the data—nobody could figure out what the authors had done, let alone what they had done wrong, until they finally released their spreadsheet. It made me imagine a world of open economic data, a Wikinomics database where any unaffiliated idiot could test a hypothesis—association between gun deaths and Evangelicalism?—on reputable numbers.
Well, it looks like the retroactionary gods were listening, because today I learned from a Guardian article that there already is a Wikidata, still in its infancy, part of the Wikimedia family.
If you have a Wikipedia name and password you can log right in and start working, although you will have to be more patient than me to find out what kind of work is available. When I say in its infancy, I mean there is really nothing for users at this point—it is in the care of the truly dedicated and technically endowed. But it's going to be wondrous!
Well, it looks like the retroactionary gods were listening, because today I learned from a Guardian article that there already is a Wikidata, still in its infancy, part of the Wikimedia family.
