The idea of the project is a new approach into collaborating on knowledge, by splitting the knowledge into smaller parts, and then being able to handle them in an easier way.

Most of the definitions come from Wikipedia. We started off trying to have people enter facts manually, but then I figured that we should leverage all the knowledge of Wikipedia that is freely available.

So I wrote a bot that is not particularly clever, but most of the times good enough for fetching facts from Wikipedia.

By the way, it can also extract facts from the German Wikipedia (there is a German version of Factolex as well: http://de.factolex.com/ as my mother tongue is actually German).