Regarding Paul's comment:
>>>I first heard about Wikidata at SemTech in San Francisco and I was told very directly that they were not interested in working with anybody who was experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users because they had worked so hard to get academic positions and get a grant from the Allen Institute and it is more cost-effective and more compatible with academic advancement to hire a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will follow orders.>>>I am, frankly, baffled by this story. It very likely was me, presenting Wikidata at SemTech in SF, so it probably was me you have been talking with, but I have no recollection of a conversation going the way you describe it.If I remember the timing correctly, I didn't have an academic position at the time of SemTech. Actually, I gave up my academic position to move to Berlin and work on Wikidata.The donors on Wikidata never exercised any influence on the projects, beyond requiring reports on the progress.I cannot imagine that I would ever have said that we "were not interested in working with anybody who was experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users", because, really, that would make no sense to say. I also do not remember having gotten an application from you.Regarding the team that we wanted and eventually did hire, I would sternly disagree with the description of "a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will follow orders" - from the applications we got we choose the most suitable team we could pull together. And considering the discussions we had in the following months, following orders was neither their strength nor the qualification they were chosen for. Nor did they consist only of young people. Instead, it turned out, they were exactly the kind of independent thinkers with dedication to the goal and quality that we were aiming for. Fortunately, for the project.Maybe the conversation went differently than you are remembering it.E.g. I would have insisted on building Wikidata on top of MediaWiki (for operational reasons).E.g. I would have insisted on everyone to work on Wikidata to move to Berlin (because I thought it would be the only possibility to get the project to an acceptable state in the original timeframe, so that we can ensure its future sustainability).E.g. I would have disagreed on being able to use RDF/SPARQL backends back then out of the box to be Wikidata's backend (but I would have been open for anyone showing me that I was wrong, and indeed very happy because, seriously, I have an unreasonable fondness for SPARQL and RDF).E.g. I would have disagreed that our job as Wikimedia is to spend too many resource in pretty frontends (because that is something the community can do, and as we see, is doing very well - I think Wikimedia should really concentrate on those pieces of work that cannot and are not being done by the community).E.g. I would have insisted on not outsourcing any major part of the development effort to an external service provider.E.g. it could be that we already had all positions filled, and simply no money for more people (really depends on the timing).So there are plenty of points we might have disagreed with, and which, maybe misunderstood, maybe subtly altered by the passage of time in a fallible memory, have lead to the recollection of our conversation that you presented, but, for the reasons mentioned above, I think that your recollection is incorrect.On Fri Feb 20 2015 at 12:42:44 PM Daniel Kinzler <daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de> wrote:Hi Paul!
I understand your frustration, but let me put a few things into perspective.
For reference: I'm employed by WMDE and work on wikibase/wikidata. I have been
working on MediaWiki since 2005, and am being payed for it since 2008.
Am 20.02.2015 um 19:14 schrieb Paul Houle:
> I am not an academic. The people behind Wikidata are.
To the extend that most of us have some college degree. The only "full" academic
involved is Markus Krötzsch, who together with Denny Vrandecic developed many of
the concepts behind Wikidata. He acts as an advisor to the Wikidata project, but
doesn't have any formal position.
Oh, we also have a group of students working on their bachelor project with us.
> I first heard about Wikidata at SemTech in San Francisco and I was told very
> directly that they were not interested in working with anybody who was
> experienced with putting data from generic database in front of users because
> they had worked so hard to get academic positions and get a grant from the Allen
> Institute and it is more cost-effective and more compatible with academic
> advancement to hire a bunch of young people who don't know anything but will
> follow orders.
Auch. Working with such people would be a drag. Luckily, we have an awesome team
of full blooded programmers. Not that we get everything right, or done in time...
> RDF* and SPARQL* do not come from an academic background but from a commercial
> organization that expects to make money by satisfying people's needs and it is
> being supported by a number of other commercial organizations. See
You'll be happy to hear that we are working with high priority to finally
provide full query functionality. We are still evaluating options (WMF's Nik and
Stas have been visiting the WMDE office for this, just this week - have a safe
trip home, guys!), but the current favorite is, in fact, BlazeGraph, formerly
BigData, by the people who came up with RDF* and RDR. If we end up using that,
chances are good that we will be exposing a SPARQL endpoint directly.
We may still find a deal breaker though, so no promise. Another option would be
Neo4J, using a graph oriented mapping. We could still expose SPARQL (building
upon Gremlin, IIRC), but I suspect that we'd probably rather expose something
more domain specific, perhaps based on Magnus' WDQ syntax, that operates
directly on the graph.
> This is something that builds on everything successful about RDF and SPARQL and
> adds the "missing links" that it takes to implement data wikis. If somebody was
> starting Wikidata today or if the kind of billionaire who buys sports teams the
> way I might buy a game console wanted to fund an effort to keep Freebase going,
> RDF*/SPARQL* is the way to do it.
I still stand by the decision not to use a triple store as the primary storage
for wikidata, for various reasons (MediaWiki integration, especially versioning,
being among the most important ones).
But I'm all for mapping our internal model to RDF, and exposing a SPARQL
endpoint, if we can do that in a reliable manner with the available resources.
I'd rather have limited query functionality with five nines uptime than a SPARQL
endpoint that is down half the time.
Speaking of mapping to RDF: Have you read
<http://korrekt.org/papers/Wikidata-RDF-export-2014.pdf>?
> Wikidata is playing to whims of a few rich
> people and it could disappear at any time when those people get tired of it or
> decide they have what they want and don't want to make it any easier for
> competitors to follow them.
Wikidata development and hosting is funded by donations to Wikimedia, like all
Wikimedia projects. The first year of development was indeed funded by large
companies and trusts (AI2, Google, and the Moore Foundation), but to my
knowledge they never tried to influence our decisions.
We have never had academic funding. I don't think we are going to say "no" if we
can get any, though.
> The trouble is that most people interested in open data seem to think their time
> is worth nothing and other people's time is worth nothing and aren't interested
> in paying even a small amount for services so the producers throw stuff that
> almost works over the wall. I don't think it would be all that difficult for me
> to do for Wikidata what I did for Freebase but I am not doing it because you
> aren't going to pay for it.
If you mail me an application/offer, I'm happy to forward and, depending on
content, champion it. Wikimedia doesn't pay as well as big tech companies
(Wikimedia operates on a shoe string budget, compared to other sites with
upwards of 100k hits per second), but the pay isn't shoddy either. Come and
visit! Let's talk!
--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer
Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
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