The Wikimedia Foundation and the German chapter of Wikimedia have announced grants totaling approximately $1.7 million (€1.3 million) from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google to create Wikidata, a collaboratively edited database of the world's knowledge.

The first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata will support more than two hundred and eighty language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles that are part of the Wikipedia site. The aim of the effort is to create a higher level of consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, while increasing the availability of information in smaller language editions and reducing the maintenance efforts required of the ninety thousand volunteers who edit the site.

The new database will be developed in three phases. The first, expected to be finished by August, will centralize links shared by different language versions of the online encyclopedia. In phase two, editors will be able to add and use data from the database. And the third and final phase will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on data in Wikidata.

The Allen Institute will provide 50 percent of the funding for the effort, with Moore and Google each contributing 25 percent. Wikimedia Deutschland will be responsible for initial development of Wikidata and plans to hand over operation and maintenance of the project to the Wikimedia Foundation by March 2013.

"Wikidata is a simple and smart idea, and an ingenious next step in the evolution of Wikipedia," said Dr. Mark Greaves, vice president of the Allen Institute. "It will transform the way that encyclopedia data is published, made available, and used by a global audience. Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world."