Similarities between #Commons and #Wikidata

There are many similarities between #Commons in its early days and Wikidata. At first there were the big dreams, the wonderful opportunities on the horizon. Slowly but surely many of these opportunities are realised.

The first major goal for Commons was for it to be used for displaying images in all the Wikipedias. Once this became possible it took quite some time to move most of the images from the Wikipedias to Commons.

The first major goal for Wikidata was to replace the old interwiki-links. This has been accomplished and many new opportunities are undertaken by a community that is both old and new. The next big thing will be to move as many assertions as possible to Wikidata. For instance assertions like the date of birth and the date of death of a person.

Many resources like the GND of the Deutsche National Bibliothek contain many such assertions and, the German Wikipedia community actively compares the GND them with the assertions in the German Wikipedia. The challenge will be not only to move these facts to Wikidata but also to continue this great undertaking with Wikidata as its basis.

When assertions are increasingly served from Wikidata, corrections will flow to wherever they are used. When the labels of the statements are usable in multiple languages, these assertions can be served in a multilingual Wikipedia.
Thanks,
       GerardM