https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
> Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.
> Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and others.
Its actually quite cool. If you have never played with it i encourage checking out some of the example queries (there is a button labelled examples) on https://query.wikidata.org/
Pulling it into a mediawiki extension (or core) and making it part of the page-level metadata gets suggested pretty frequently, but it's a bit contentious amongst the hardcore editors who'd need to actually adopt such things. The template-based nature of the current infoboxes mean that they're very accessible to the community, and it's easy to spin off new variants or make changes without getting programmers to help you.
There's slow movement towards getting the sort of data that winds up in infoboxes into wikidata, but it's still somewhat spotty.
(If you've never done it, it can be quite edifying to install mediawiki for yourself and seeing how much of the surrounding infrastructure of wikipedia is absent because it's all templates.)
I submit this link after coming across this site while Googling for info on parsing wikipedia "infoboxes". I plan to check out their "Article Structured Contents (BETA)" API. Improving infoboxes to be machine-readable seems important. And it would be bad if didn't do this because it's a revenue stream for them.