Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
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Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
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Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#2This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#3This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..
I think whatever they choose to implement it in has a good chance at becoming the next de facto standard.
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#4Missing from the FAQ: What's the difference between Freebase and Wikidata?
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#5This is actually a startup idea I've had for a while now. It's a great idea in theory, but it's very tricky in practice. Facts have a mysterious way of vanishing if you look closely enough at them, and the raw numbers themselves don't actually tell you anything.
The part that's actually interesting is:
- The methodology behind the numbers
- What we think is most likely the case based on the evidence available
- How each fact connects with other facts
- What we think we should do based on the evidence available
Being able to embed facts is definitely a cool use case, but unless you have all the other stuff backing it up when you click the link back to the database then it's pretty much worthless. And curating these sorts of epistemological discussions and third party analyses isn't something that really fits within the Wikimedia mission, so I doubt they will even try.
Because of this I doubt their implementation of the project will be successful, although I do think it's a space that ultimately has potential.
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#6This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..
RDF has been adopted by some pretty big data websites, and apparently that's one of the formats they plan to support:
The data will be exported in different formats, especially RDF, SKOS, and JSON.
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#7Missing from the FAQ: What's the difference between Freebase and Wikidata?
And dbpedia?
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#8This might be very interesting if it's implemented in a sane way. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data for now..
What does it mean "a very widely-adopted standard in the world of open data"? "standard" of what?
There are meta-format standards: XML, RDF, HTML and lately JSON. With these four you are probably covering 80% of the world published open data, the rest is PDF, MS DOC and MS XLS.
That is missing, and good like filling this void, is a single format that you can use to describe everything. Personally, I think that such a single format will never exist and looking for one is pointless. Geographical data requires attention to certain details, music data to others; this means two different formats must be used (serialized through XML, RDF, HTML, whatever). If you are thinking about "bridging" different formats and data models, then, welcome to the world of RDF/S, OWL, TopicMaps ontologies (or ontologY), I'm not sure you want to live there :)
This new Wikidata, just like Freebase, is trying to collect structured or semi-structured data instead of unstructured data such as that present in Wikipedia. I am happy about the aim (completely unstructured data is basically useless for any serious data reuse and data extraction) but my fear is that they will not succeed as well as they did with Wikipedia. Wikipedia funded its success on the fact that anybody could edit it. In order to edit a wikipedia page you only need very low technical skills and basic writing skills (plus knowledge of the topic, obviously). Adding and manipulating structured data requires people to obey to a certain mental grid, to a formalized model, to a schema developed by someone and put in place to be respected strictly. The vast majority of people is easily demotivated when they are required to learn something substantial beforehand and most of the edits of unskilled users end up removed by watchdog (something seen often in high quality Wikipedia articles: edits made by new users are quickly reverted on the grounds that they did not follow some of the many guidelines that must be followed).
My idea is that many problems found in structured-data projects (FreeBase, MusicBrainz...) could be alleviated by better interfaces and a wide use of automation, both things that Wikipedia projects do not seem to excel in.
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#9tl;dr: spin-off Wikipedia infoboxes into a seperate project with an API, and then use that data to bootstrap an open data project with broader goals.
In theory, it's a good idea. It takes an existing useful data source and puts in a form that encourages reuse, and since it solves the bootstrapping problem then it's not obviously doomed to failure like the Semantic Web.
I see two potential downsides.
My first concern is that, in practice, it will make editing Wikipedia more complex. There's no inherent reason why this should be the case, but there's no inherent reason why Wikimedia Commons should make editing Wikipedia more complex either, yet it undeniably does.
Secondly, it will prevent a similar source of data from appearing with broader terms of use. For example, OpenLibrary is public domain.
Re: Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006
#10Like others here, it's something I've been thinking about for a number of years.
This is an important project, with the potential to eclipse wikipedia, maybe even growing to be the saviour of free software? My reasoning follows.
Currently we program computers by giving them a set of instructions on how to achieve a goal. As computers grow more powerful, we will stop giving detailed instructions. Instead, we will write a general purpose deduction/inference engine, feed in a volume of raw data and let the computer derive the instructions it must follow to achieve the given goal.
There are two parts to such a system: the engine and the data. The engine is something that free software is capable of producing. The missing component is the data. The wikidata project is this missing component.
I'm convinced that Wolfram Alpha is a glimpse of this future: an engine coupled to a growing body of structured data. Wolfram's end game isn't taking over search, but taking over computer programming and ultimately reasoning. It's just that search is currently a tractable problem for Alpha, one that can pay the bills until it becomes more capable. There will come a day when Alpha is powerful enough to automatically translate natural language into structured data, at which point it will spider the Internet and its database and capabilities will grow explosively.
Free software needs Wikidata, to arrive at this endpoint first and avoid being made largely irrelevant by Alpha (or Google?)