I didn't mean to debate the value of Wikidata vs Wikipedia specifically, more just used them as examples of semantic data vs free-form thought. Humans don't thi

I didn't mean to debate the value of Wikidata vs Wikipedia specifically, more just used them as examples of semantic data vs free-form thought. Humans don't think or produce cultural output in neat units of semantic data. That sort of classification usually comes after the fact, with effort and delay, vs our natural thought and speech patterns (which tend to be rambling, meandering, interdisciplinary, emotive, inconsistent, etc.) It's not that prose is any more or less valuable than classification, but that classification takes a lot of work and doesn't come naturally to most knowledge producers. It's a speciality unto itself that most people aren't super interested in. In the case of schema.org and RDF, that effort had no visible impact on anything, so people just stopped trying after a while. In the case of Wikidata, it's still ongoing, but nowhere near as popular as the more natural (to our species) output of Wikipedia. FWIW, I'm saying this as someone who spent time classifying articles on Wikipedia, contributing to Wikidata, marking up our pages with microdata, managing databases for a living, etc. I'm not philosophically against better classification. Just observing that efforts to automatically describe human output via algorithms and ML seem to work a lot better than asking human content editors to self-classify their output with anything more complex than WordPress tags. People don't tend to enjoy or be effective at complex classifications, especially when there's no visible benefit from it. All that microdata never really surfaced anywhere and there was no useful mechanism of discovery or sharing.