#English #Wikipedia and those who died in #2015

It is wonderful news and I am grateful that the English Wikipedia decided to use Wikidata in stead of its own templates. It is wonderful, they have realised that the good people at Wikidata maintain that data..

I did it with pleasure, and I am thrilled to learn that the data is of high quality and up to date. I made it so because copying dates from English into Wikidata is easiest and therefore I always did them first the past two years.

The move of the English Wikipedia to use Wikidata data has been used as an excuse NOT to use the data harvested by DBpedia. That argument is wrong for three reasons.

• they update information in real time by harvesting from the RSS feed.
• they do this not only for the English Wikipedia
• they do not rely on a poor sod who adds info by hand

PLEASE, make use of the DBpedia data and please do consider the DBpedia people as part of our world. Let us learn from what they learned and make use of what they so gladly want to share with us. Share with us on our terms, share with us using our license.

Thanks,

       GerardM