I think it's important to consider the distinction between a category system and
semantic queries. I think it's very likely that DBpedia and Wikidata will converge
over time and develop a simple enough query interface that causes fewer people to use the
category system because we will be able to automatically generate relevant queries related
to a given article. DBpedia currently has a lot more data, but Wikidata is important for
many editing scenarios. Also, in the future I think there will be a lot of content
scenarios where it is natural to start by putting data into Wikidata and then including it
in articles instead of just extracting information from articles. If you are familiar with
query languages you can get comfortable with the DBpedia SPARQL examples in a few minutes,
but for a typical reader that just wants to go from an article about a person to a list of
similar people it is hard to beat scrolling down and just clicking on a category. I did a
test query on DBpedia to plot all sports cars by their engine sizes, and I think for the
types of things it enables you to do it is totally worth the learning curve. That being
said, I think the category system has a lot of potential for better browsing scenarios as
opposed to queries. I've been making a tool that mixes the article view data with the
category system. You can see a video of the basic idea here and a screenshot of football
league popularity split by language.
I'm currently
multiplying the Chinese traffic by 30 to try and account for Baidu Baike.
Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 08:14:54 +0200
From: jane023(a)gmail.com
To: wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Question about wikipedia categories.
Wondering exactly the same thing - my frustrations with categories
began about three years ago and it seems I am surprised monthly by
severe limitations to this outdated apparatus. I am a heavy category
user, but I would love to be able to kick it out the door in favour of
a more structured method. As far as I can tell, there is very little
synchronisation among language Wikipedias of category trees, and being
able to apply a central structure to all Wikipedias through Wikidata
sounds like a great idea, and one which would not disturb the current
category trees we already have, but supplement them. As I see it, some
category structures are OK, but when categories get big, people split
them in non-standard ways, causing problems like this recent
media-hype regarding female novellists. I think that it's great this
is in the news in this way, because I am sure that most Wikipedia
readers never knew we had categories, and this is a great introduction
to them, as well as an invitation to edit Wikipedia.
2013/5/4, Chris Maloney <voldrani(a)gmail.com>om>:
I am just curious if there has ever been
discussion about the
potential for reimplementing / replacing the category system in
Wikipedia with semantic tagging in WikiData. It seem to me that the
recent kerfuffle with regards to "American women writers" would not
have happened if the pages were tagged with simple RDF assertions
instead of these convoluted categories. I know, of course, that it
would be a huge undertaking, but I just don't see how the category
system can continue to scale (I'm amazed it has scaled as well as it
has already, of course).
I am trying to learn more about wikidata, and have perused the various
infos and FAQs for the last two hours, and can't find any discussion
of this particular issue.
-- Chris
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