It's like freebase all right, but the article has something right about adoption. He points out some big company would have to donate a great starting dataset to drive adoption.

I think this is one problem with Freebase. Another problem I see is the structuring of the data, it is a hurdle to sharing.

Finally the last problem I see is Data is currently very much seen as a competitive advantage. When Google introduce functionalities to make corrections on Google Maps, I don’t think they do it to share with everyone else. They do it because they want Google Maps to be the destination with the best possible data. A wiki of data is a great idea, but I’m not sure we have the solution yet.