On 11/23/2010 10:01 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
On 11/22/2010 10:24 PM, Michael Peel wrote:
In my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation should
very seriously look into starting something like wikidata.
One major problem is
that different people have very
differing understanding of what "wikidata" should mean.
It is an abstract good, similar to "world peace" or
"democracy" -- or Wikimedia's "usability" project,
that introduced slow and broken Javascript instead
of actually increasing usability. With this background
I would advise against starting a "wikidata" project.
What should be started is something smaller and
more focused, that solves some actual problem.
This is like asking for "freedom of the press" or
"women's suffrage" rather than abstract "democracy".
So, which concrete, smaller ambitions could you list?
Sure, but the problem small steps only address small problems and do not
build a foundation to fix larger issues. A series of template hacks,
bots and external indexers could address most small ambitions, but a
unified underlining structure would bring many greater 'ambitions'
within reach. For example if we just wrote a one off system to
exclusively handle interlanguage links, it would not be nearly as useful
as a system that tied these inerlanguage links together as multilingual
labels for relational data. ( Apples are fruits, even when they are
'Manzanas' and 'Fruta', something that would be wholly lost in the
'one
off' solution.
To borrow from your analogy you need a "constitution" before "freedom of
the press" or "womens suffrage" makes any sense, else every movment is
extrodinary laborious, can't build on any other effort and is exclusive
to a single problem for a single set of people.
--michael