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This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..
The important thing is to jump in and make a start. The right way of doing things will become evident as the project evolves.
tl;dr: spin-off Wikipedia infoboxes into a seperate project with an API, and then use that data to bootstrap an open data project with broader goals. In theory, it's a good idea. It takes an existing useful data source and puts in a form that encourages reuse, and since it solves the bootstrapping problem then it's not obviously doomed to failure like the Semantic Web. I see two potential downsides. My first concern…
Somewhat ironically , since part of the reason is that you can't copyright facts, they didn't just take the existing data under the same theory, but asked everyone to accept the new licence. I wonder what Wikipedia plan to do?
Missing from the FAQ: What's the difference between Freebase and Wikidata?
From their site: The DBpedia knowledge base currently describes more than 3.64 million things, out of which 1.83 million are classified in a consistent Ontology, including 416,000 persons, 526,000 places, 106,000 music albums, 60,000 films, 17,500 video games, 169,000 organisations, 183,000 species and 5,400 diseases.
Edit: As an afterthought, it would make a lot of sense to manage it like a git repository, where someone could submit a pull request for data changes, and then some subgroup or a trusted percentage of the population approves the request and it gets merged into the master dataset.
My concern for the potential for abuse in this project is much greater than that of wikipedia. How is wikimedia going to ensure that there are no malicious edits to this data? Any changes will almost certainly need stringent peer review. Edit: As an afterthought, it would make a lot of sense to manage it like a git repository, where someone could submit a pull request for data changes, and then some subgroup or a tru…
Missing from the FAQ: What's the difference between Freebase and Wikidata?
It looks like the main difference is two-way integration: instead of just scraping data from Wikipedia dumps to produce a structured database (like Freebase and dbpedia do), it's going to store the canonical version of some of the information there, and pull from it to populate the infoboxes. One of the motivations seems to be to keep the data in sync across Wikipedia languages, so an addition or fix propagates to th…