<i>Wikidata: The next big internet resource </i>

Imagine a website where you could immediately access a list of all the action movie stars who wear size-10 shoes and have blonde hair, or a list of the cities in tropical climates with the highest rate of employment for recently graduated communications majors.
Such a resource is on the horizon.
In Germany, a group of pioneering Wikipedia enthusiasts are creating a searchable data trove they think will change the way people access information, and perhaps change the world itself.
The data trove, called Wikidata, is in an early development stage, with only a few paid Wikimedia Deutschland employees tackling the myriad technical and logistical issues involved in the daunting task of creating a community-edited database.
“It has a very simple idea. It wants to be the Wikipedia for data,” said Pavel Ritcher, CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland.
“Right now data is spread out, under license or hard to access because of technical reasons. We don't know how it will change the world, but it will change the world.”
Like Wikipedia, Wikidata's data would be submitted by internet users and vetted by volunteer editors before inclusion in the database.
The project is scheduled to be released in spring 2013.