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.