Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode

Just a quick add-on to Jane and Paul about the scope of data in Wikidata. I think it is inevitable that Wikidata will start holding excess data that isn't being used in Wikipedia. Take the climate boxes that are on many city pages that show the average high and low per month for the last 5 years and whatnot. If we make a Lua module and template that generates those tables each time a new statement is added to specific properties in Wikidata then over time Wikidata will have a lot of historical weather data that isn't currently being displayed in Wikipedia. I think that's a good thing. No one deletes stuff these days. They just let the databases grow because storage is so cheap. From: hale.michael.jr(a)live.com To: wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2013 15:13:21 -0400 Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode There are lots of code snippets scattered around the internet, but most of them can't be wired together in a simple flowchart manner. If you look at object libraries that are designed specifically for that purpose, like Modelica, you can do all sorts of neat engineering tasks like simulate the thermodynamics and power usage of a new refrigerator design. Then if your company is designing a new insulation material you would make a new "block" with the experimentally determined properties of your material to include in the programmatic flowchart to quickly calibrate other aspects of the refrigerator's design. To my understanding, Modelica is as big and good as it gets for code libraries that represent physically accurate objects. Often, the visual representation of those objects needs to be handled separately. As far as general purpose, standard programming libraries go, Mathematica is the best one I've found for quickly prototyping new functionality. A typical "web mashup" app or site will combine functionality and/or data from 3 to 6 APIs. Mobile apps will typically use the phone's functionality, an extra library for better graphics support, a proprietary library or two made by the company, and a couple of web APIs. A similar story for desktop media-editing programs, business software, and high-end games except the libraries are often larger. But there aren't many software libraries that I would describe as huge. And there are even fewer that manage to scale the usefulness of the library equally with the size it occupies on disk. Platform fragmentation (increase in number and popularity of smart phones and tablets) has proven to be a tremendous challenge for continuing to improve libraries. I now just have 15 different ways to draw a circle on different screens. The attempts to provide virtual machines with write-once run-anywhere functionality (Java and .NET) have failed, often due to customer lock-in reasons as much as platform fragmentation. Flash isn't designed to grow much beyond its current scope. The web standards can only progress as quickly as the least common denominator of functionality provided by other means, which is better than nothing I suppose. Mathematica has continued to improve their library (that's essentially what they sell), but they don't try to cover a lot of platforms. They also aren't open source and don't attempt to make the entire encyclopedia interactive and programmable. Open source attempts like the Boost C++ library don't seem to grow very quickly. But I think using Wikipedia articles as a scaffold for a massive open source, object-oriented library might be what is needed. I have a few approaches I use to decide what code to write next. They can be arranged from most useful as an exercise to stay sharp in the long term to most immediately useful for a specific project. Sometimes I just write code in a vacuum. Like, I will just choose a simple task like making a 2D ball bounce around some stairs interactively and I will just spend a few hours writing it and rewriting it to be more efficient and easier to expand. It always gives me a greater appreciation for the types of details that can be specified to a computer (and hence the scope of the computational universe, or space of all computer programs). Like with the ball bouncing example you can get lost defining interesting options for the ball and the ground or in the geometry logic for calculating the intersections (like if the ball doesn't deform or if the stairs have certain constraints on their shape there are optimizations you can make). At the end of the exercise I still just have a ball bouncing down some stairs, but my mind feels like it has been on a journey. Sometimes I try to write code that I think a group of people would find useful. I will browse the articles in the areas of computer science category by popularity and start writing the first things I see that aren't already in the libraries I use. So I'll expand Mathematica's FindClusters function to support density based methods or I'll expand the RandomSample function to support files that are too large to fit in memory with a reservoir sampling algorithm. Finally, I write code for specific projects. I'm trying to genetically engineer turf grass that doesn't need to be cut, so I need to automate some of the work I do for GenBank imports and sequence comparisons. For all of those, if there was an organized place to put my code afterwards so it would fit into a larger useful library I would totally be willing to do a little bit of gluing work to help fit it all together. _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l