Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is backing the Wikidata project, which is part of the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement.
Wikidata is a new project with a big goal. It wants to be a collaboratively edited database of all of the world’s knowledge. It will be used to make Wikipedia entries more accurate by sourcing better data. It will also make it easier to manage the 90,000 volunteers.
“Wikidata is ground-breaking. It is the largest technical project ever undertaken by one of the 40 international Wikimedia chapters,” Pavel Richter, CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland, said in a statement.
Here’s Steve, who joined us for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to experience being behind the wheel in a whole new way. We organized this test as a technical experiment, but we think it’s also a promising look at what autonomous technology may one day deliver if rigorous technology and safety standards can be met.
For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world — large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether.
As for users, the latest official number we can find clocks in at 845 million active monthly users, which comes directly from Facebook’s IPO filing. Interestingly, 850 million users has also been widely reported.
To stay conservative, we’ll go with $102.8 billion / 845 million users. This means each user is worth… approximately $121.
Though this is all for fun and games, it’s perhaps telling as well. Every Facebook user adds up to the gigantic social platform we see today, and while the sum is likely greater than the parts, there’s no reason to discount the value of a user.
