No one can see the future, but my impression of this project is that if it achieves moderate success then it could be the start of the most consequential societal contribution that Wikimedia projects make.
My reading of this is that it is talking about the Semantic Web. It discusses making technical information accessible and readable to people outside of any given field. A lot of this proposal presumes open access to writings and more importantly to the data behind research, which is an excellent demand made more persuasive by hosting a Wikimedia community who can work with the data when and if it is made free, and who will note when data is and is not being made available.
This project has the potential to bring a lot of professionalism to Wikimedia projects because it provides a data sharing environment on neutral, non-profit grounds when no obvious alternative exists. I can imagine subject matter experts using Wikidata to host their datasets here, even if only to mirror it here, and if that gets anyone to interact with it even one time in a period of years then the cost of mirroring here is so low that it could become standard for people to do this.
I see this project as the start of making Wikimedia projects more personally customized, in the sense that it seeks to make available highly specific information in a narrow range which could be generated by calling only certain parts of multiple datasets which are of interest to the individual who requests them, but which are not otherwise published. For lots of reasons, and especially the layman access to databases, this project seems like a radical intervention to me. This is why Wikidata was introduced. Blue Rasberry (talk)16:57, 5 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think you've summarized my sentiments rather aptly, Blue Rasberry; these are very heartening developments, though I think it will be years yet before people truly begin to appreciate how monumental the impacts could be. I don't think it's in the least overblown to say that using Wikimedia's framework for collaboration could prove to be an absolute revolution in many areas of research, so to have my attention brought back to Wikidata in the light of these developments has me quite excited. Snowtalk05:54, 9 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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