When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a "Wikipedia for structured data." So it shouldn't be surprising that we've been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation's project Wikidata[1] since it launched about two years ago. We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata -- they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.

So we've decided to help transfer the data in Freebase to Wikidata, and in mid-2015 we’ll wind down the Freebase service as a standalone project. Freebase has also supported developer access to the data, so before we retire it, we’ll launch a new API for entity search powered by Google's Knowledge Graph.

Loading Freebase into Wikidata as-is wouldn't meet the Wikidata community's guidelines for citation and sourcing of facts -- while a significant portion of the facts in Freebase came from Wikipedia itself, those facts were attributed to Wikipedia and not the actual original non-Wikipedia sources. So we’ll be launching a tool for Wikidata community members to match Freebase assertions to potential citations from either Google Search or our Knowledge Vault[2], so these individual facts can then be properly loaded to Wikidata. 

We believe this is the best first step we can take toward becoming a constructive participant in the Wikidata community, but we’ll look to continually evolve our role to support the goal of a comprehensive open database of common knowledge that anyone can use.

Here are the important dates to know:

Before the end of March 2015
- We’ll launch a Wikidata import review tool
- We’ll announce a transition plan for the Freebase Search API & Suggest Widget to a Knowledge Graph-based solution

March 31, 2015
- Freebase as a service will become read-only
- The website will no longer accept edits 
- We’ll retire the MQL write API

June 30, 2015
- We’ll retire the Freebase website and APIs[3]
- The last Freebase data dump will remain available, but developers should check out the Wikidata dump[4]

The Knowledge Graph team at Google

[1] http://wikidata.org
[2] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nlao/publication/2014.kdd.pdf
[3] https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/
[4] http://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/