Denny is well-connected to "fail upwards"...being a Google employee, a bigshot (the first-ever admin) in the Croatian language Wikipedia, and such.....As you can imagine, this work will require a lot of software development, and a lot of cooperation among Wikimedians. In order to make this effort possible, Denny will join the Foundation as a staff member in July and lead this initiative. You may know Denny as the creator of Wikidata, a long-time community member, a former staff member at Wikimedia Deutschland, and a former Trustee at the Wikimedia Foundation [2]. We are very excited that Denny will bring his skills and expertise to work on this project alongside the Foundation’s product, technology, and community liaison teams.
And in May-June 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation installed a Google employee, Denny Vrandečić, on its Board of Trustees.
On 8 April 2016 he resigned, in great disgust. [19] "There were constant and continuous attacks against me, as being merely Google’s mole on the Board, even of the election being bought by Google. I would not have minded these attacks so much - if I would have had the feeling that my input to the Board, based on my skills and experiences, would have been particularly valuable, or if I would have had the feeling of getting anything done while being on the Board. As it is, neither was the case."
There was an announcement months ago about this "projectthing". Neowin ran the story today, as did this blogger--and no one else did, that I can find. Have YOU ever heard of the Neowin tech blog?
Hacker News had a thread today. The nerds mutter. Note that "bawolff" showed up to blubber that Google and Wikimedia are NOT "very close partners". He happens to be one of Wikipedia's insiders, an admin on Wikinews (lol) and other WMF sites.
Wikidata has already been a giant shitshow. (Prove me wrong, link to three major software projects using Wikidata that are not top-secret and not controlled by the WMF. Other than Google's use of their data, of course!)
