> One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data).

I agree a lot with this. As a person who speaks many languages, something that gets evident very early is that isn't one "The Web", but many webs like English Web, Spanish Web, Portuguese Web and so on.

This is extra noticeable on Wikipedia, since many articles exist in many languages. The drawback is that sometimes information is split across the languages, so someone speaking English, Spanish and Swedish can sometimes build a more complete picture from just one Wikipedia article, if the data isn't in the other article languages.

Enter Wikidata+Wikibase, which makes the knowledge itself trans-language, and instead only the definition/value names need translated, but the composition itself is language-agnostic.

If this imaginary article with separate info in three languages for one article could all use Wikidata as a base, they can all share the same knowledge and make sure that people who only speak one of the languages, come out with the same understanding.

Basically, Wikidata if successful, will multiply the knowledge on the web!