Back in 2022, he ran for city council in a small California town. He lost, but the moment forever changed the way he saw the place - and local governments, for that matter. "I was trying to become a better candidate," he recalled to TechCrunch. "I wanted to understand how my city actually worked, what decisions had been made, why, who said what. And I couldn't figure it out. It's a total black box, and almost intentionally opaque."
While tech and AI giants guard their knowledge graphs behind proprietary walls, a more open model is quietly powering innovative projects from São Paulo to Nairobi. Wikidata, the collaborative backbone behind Wikipedia's structured data, has become the world's largest free knowledge database. Lydia Pintscher, who leads the Wikidata project at Wikimedia Deutschland, oversees this enormous experiment in open collaboration. More than 25,000 contributors across 190 countries have built a database containing 116.6 million data points, edited nearly 500,000 times daily.