Hi James,
thanks for the pointer to [1].
1. "The main use case of Wikidata (a centralised, multi-lingual site that serves as a data repository) is different from that of SMW (a data-enhanced MediaWiki)" OK, SMW installations can be centralized repositories (try DSMW) and obviously can be multilingual too. So what's the difference between these use cases? The distinction of "data repository" vs "data-enhanced" is too fine for me to understand.
2. "Also, the more complex structures in Wikidata could be captured in SMW using internal objects." Exactly, my, point. So build-out SMW don't trivialize SMW don't harm the SMW community. See [[meta:wikitopics]] for my first cut at capturing the "more complex structures" in SMW: storing Dublin Core records as subobjects, containing (pointer-to) values-of the property. Hardly rocket science!
3. "The user interface of Wikibase Repository will be based on input forms, and thus quite different from SMW. " From this I conclude that Wikidata forms will not populate any template (eg {{{for template|Infobox}}}) - but invocation of the same machinery is being done under the covers. From this I conclude that the entire approach of Semantic Forms is being tossed away. It is saying that noone can use wikidata to maintain structured data attached to a page via templates nor use wikidata forms to implement their own forms -- so highly specialized to what end I cannot fathom.
4. "It is not defined yet what kind of query language Wikidata will support in Phase 3 (or thereafter)" -- yet another tack that makes SMW irrelevant in a wikidata-world. Why not build-out SMW to more efficiently handle multilingual values? SMW installations want that too!
In summary about [1], SMW installations want provenance data too, you know. We want to keep using SMW, not install a new functionally highly similar extension that can only lead to overlap confusion inefficiency. The operative presumption of [1] is that SMW cannot/will not ever support provenance data... surely the author should give more credit to creative SMW developers.
_re_: performance - I am referring to duplicated functionality between wikidata & smw... (I also am very thankful for recent performance work going on)... See #5 in [1] for specific examples of such duplication... and with that fact now documented, how can anyone say that the audiences diverge?
- jmc
On 13.06.2012 09:41, James HK wrote:
Hi John,
Being only a "minor" member of the SMW
community, I'd like to respond
to some of your assumptions you made
about the SMW community as whole.
... cessation of SMW
development
"Some of us" where worried at beginning of the wikidata
project but I
think Markus tried to ease those fears a bit in his
email from 01 May
2012 (see [1]).
SMW subjectively seems to be
encountering quality control issues lately
SMW as a community
relies on its members to ensure quality control and
if you look at the
commit/review statistics than you can see that only
a handful of
people have actively committed work for SMW 1.7/SMW 1.8
which means to
exercise quality control the community is relying on
those actively
involved.
... performan
ion to wikidata but I can see from a SMW
perspective that several efforts are being considered to cease unnecessary overhead (see [3] [4] [5]). Of course some extensions t
s
basis such as Semantic Drilldown have yet to come up with an intelligent caching strategy to minimize its impact on performance. (For example in our case we have nearly 1.5M triplets and we can feel when Semantic Drilldown is doing a database select with a large filter set). ... [[wikidata]] is doomed for not creating stakeholders within the wiki-user community that includes SMW developers
Some of the SMW
core developers are actively involved in the wikidata
project
therefore this fear mi> common code base as it would help to ensure quality control in future and those who know the wikidata code base may feel encouraged to commit to SMW as well. SMW and wikidata certainly have a divergent target audiences but as a communit
pe to see a
symbiotic relationship between SMW and wikidata without having to refute neither of both. [1] http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/SMW-and-Wikidata-Was-SMW-devel-Semantic-Med... [3] [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/SMW_and_Wikidata [4] [3] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#Accepted_proposal [5] [4] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap#JavaScript_base_for_dynamic_r... [6] [5] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#SMW_query_management_and_sm... [7] Cheers, mwjames On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:03 AM, <jmcclure@hypergrove.com [8]> wrote: Denny said: On the other hand, you are not the only person thinking that this (Wikitopics) is a good idea (hello Gerard!), and in the long run Wikidata could be extended to such a system -- but for now I regard this to be out of scope for Wikidata and I will not devote resources for this. It can be added later anyway. Denny, I never see the long-run! Anyway, to get real, be aware there are specific concerns about [[wikidata]] within the SMW community in the here and n
appening a bit as SMW subjectively seems to be
encountering quality control issues lately * we worry that, whenever we install the [[Wikidata]] extension, then the performance of client sites will be affected by the burden of multiple forms, query and format software modules, syntaxes, styles, artifacts etc * we worry that, since no specific problems experienced by wiki-users have yet been identified that [[Wikidata]] will "fix", in the end, [[wikidata]] is doomed for not creating stakeholders within the wiki-user community that includes SMW developers. jmc _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l [2]
_______________________________________________
Wikidata-l mailing
list
Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
Links: ------ [1] mailto:Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l [3] http://wikimedia.7.n6.nabble.com/SMW-and-Wikidata-Was-SMW-devel-Semantic-Med... [4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/SMW_and_Wikidata [5] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#Accepted_proposal [6] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap#JavaScript_base_for_dynamic_r... [7] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#SMW_query_management_and_sm... [8] mailto:jmcclure@hypergrove.com