LinkedIn’s Daniel Tunkelang published an interesting post on his personal blog overnight. In it Tunkelang, who is no stranger to the challenges of working at scale with disparate data, asks “why haven’t we seen an encyclopaedic structured data repository comparable in scope [and] scale to Wikipedia?” He acknowledges widely cited examples in this space such as Freebase, DBpedia and (in comments) FluidInfo, but notes that “they have not achieved mainstream adoption.” Are we really happier to trust the views of strangers regarding Khalistan (a new discovery for me last night) than a definitive list of Harrison Ford’s films or U.S. Presidential terms of office? Why does ‘informed opinion’ appear to draw more contributors and consumers than tabulated fact? Is one, simply, more boring, or is something else at play?