On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Wil Sinclair <wllm(a)wllm.com> wrote:
In highly structured databases, adding properties that
may be useful
for your research and the work of others would require altering the
structure itself, like adding a field, for example. That isn't easy,
because the powers that be have to first agree that it is appropriate,
worthy, and fits correctly in to the ontology. If there is a type
hierarchy, then the sample set would probably have to conform to a
sub-tree in the type hierarchy which may not correspond well to the
sample set that the researcher is actually interested in.
You can create your own instance of Wikibase and decide on the structure,
fields, ontology, etc
Then you can find the points of intersection with Wikidata concepts and
link back to them if you feel like (not necessary, though). More info:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase
I'm talking about the exact opposite, actually.
Unstructured databases
can be easily altered and indexed in much more flexible ways. The
indices for these databases wouldn't normally be stored with the data
itself; the researchers would get a data dump and create the indices
needed for their own studies. Conventions would be enforced if the
researchers wish to contribute anything back.
So basically like running an instance of CKAN?
http://ckan.org/
Most importantly, if I understand correctly, wikidata is a secondary
database that doesn't correspond one-to-one with Wikipedia articles
yet, and it's not clear to me whether it ever will. While it might be
interesting to someone using the data collected in Wikipedia and
imported in wikidata for semantic-oriented research like basic AI that
would help computers win on Jeopardy, it wouldn't be interesting to
someone studying Wikipedia itself.
It might help to improve the data accuracy since it will be possible to
update all uses of any parameter in any article at once. Some wikipedias
use that data to generate text, I guess in those cases you could say that
with quality data you will have quality text.
Cheers,
Micru