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.

... performance of client sites will be affected

I can't talk about performance in relation 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 that use SMW as 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 might be less suited but as a member of
the SMW community I'd like to see that SMW and wikidata share "some"
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
community member I hope 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-MediaWiki-and-Wikidata-ContentHandler-td4943107.html

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/SMW_and_Wikidata

[3] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#Accepted_proposal

[4] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap#JavaScript_base_for_dynamic_result_formats

[5] http://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/GSoC_2012#SMW_query_management_and_smart_updates

Cheers,

mwjames

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:03 AM, <jmcclure@hypergrove.com> 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 now: * we worry that our sites are threatened by virtual cessation of SMW development -- this may already be happening 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l

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