Rebecca J. Rosen reports in The Atlantic on an effort to automate more of the updates in Wikipedia through the new project called Wikidata.
The current plans are for the project to roll out in three phases over the next year. The first phase, set to be completed by this August, is the centralization of all the different points of data in Wikipedia across languages whose updates could be coordinated. The second phase allows for people to begin collaboratively building the database’s datasets. They hope to finish that by the end of this year. The final phase “will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata.” By March of next year Wikimedia Deutschland hopes to turn the database over to the Wikimedia Foundation.
There’s more information about Wikidata on Wikimedia.org.