See [8] and [9] for an introduction to Wikidata. I have no notable experience with Freebase, but I've been contributing to Wikidata for about 2 years and would be happy to answer any questions I can.
There's a Wikidata UI Redesign in development [1] which should improve the default site's visual appeal.
That said, while the San Francisco Wikidata page may currently be uglier than its Freebase counterpart, it is not slower. webpagetest.org has the Wikidata page fully loaded at 8.8 s and the Freebase page 11.2 s [2, 3]. And while Reasonator is certainly dog slow (21.2 s to fully load! [4]), its San Francisco page is much more polished than the Freebase's.
There will be an attempt to reconcile future contributions.
From Denny Vrandecic, current Google researcher working on the Google Knowledge Graph, former project director of Wikidata [1]:
"Freebase has seen a huge amount of effort go into it since it went public in 2007. It makes a lot of sense to make the results of this work available to Wikidata. But knowing Wikidata and its community a bit, it is obvious that we can not and should not simply upload Freebase data to Wikidata: Wikidata would prefer the data to be referenced to external, primary sources.
"In order to do so, Google will soon start to work on an Open Source tool which will run on Wikimedia labs and which will allow Wikidata contributors to find references for a statement and then upload the statement and the reference to Wikidata. We will release several sets of Freebase data ready for consumption by this tool under a CC0 license. This tool should also work for statements already in Wikidata without sufficient references, or for other datasets, like DBpedia and other machine extraction efforts, etc.
"To make sure we get it right, we invite you to participate in the design and development of this tool here:
I understood that there's a significant quality difference with Freebase: that there are a lot of places in Wikidata showing values where a reference should be. Is that true?
And do you have any way to contact you? (My email is in my profile.)
Topics / items:
- Freebase: 46,476,860 [1]
- Wikidata: 12,921,731 [2]
Facts / claims:
- Freebase: 2,696,141,481 [1]
- Wikidata: 50,457,200 as of 2014-11-10 [3]
Instances of person / human:
- Freebase: 3,391,533 [4]
- Wikidata: 2,638,614 [5]
License for data
- Freebase: CC-BY [6]
- Wikidata: CC0 [7]
Data on Paul Graham:
- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/017cm9
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q92650
Data on San Francisco:
- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0d6lp
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62
Data on Python:
- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/05z1_
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28865
Data on APOE / Apolipoprotein E:
- Freebase: http://www.freebase.com/m/0byv2v
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14890468 (APOE), https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q424728 (Apolipoprotein E)
See [8] and [9] for an introduction to Wikidata. I have no notable experience with Freebase, but I've been contributing to Wikidata for about 2 years and would be happy to answer any questions I can.
[1] http://www.freebase.com/
[2] https://www.wikidata.org
[3] http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php
[4] http://www.freebase.com/people/person?instances
[5] http://tools.wmflabs.org/autolist /autolist1.html?q=claim[31:5]
[6] http://www.freebase.com/policies/tos
[7] See bottom of [2]
[8] Up and running with Wikidata: http://www.slideshare.net/_emw/up-and-running-with-wikidata
[9] Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web: http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf