Hoi,'

Markus when you read my reply on the original question you will see that my approach is different. The first thing that I pointed out was that a technical assumption has little to do with what people need. I indicated that when this is the approach, the answer is fix it. The notion that a large number of returns is outrageous is not of this time.

My approach was one where I even offered a possible solution, a crutch.

The approach Daniel took was to make me look ridiculous. His choice, not mine. I stayed polite and told him that his answers are not my answers and why. The point that I make is that Wikidata is a service. It will increasingly be used for the most outrageous queries and people will expect it to work because why else do we put all this data in there. Why else is this the data hub for Wikipedia. Why else

Do appreciate that the aim of the WMF is to share in the sum of all available knowledge. When the current technology is what we have to make do with, fine for now. Say so, but do not ridicule me for saying that it is not good enough, it is not now and it will certainly not be in the future...

Thanks,

GerardM

On 11 February 2016 at 15:25, Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:

On 11.02.2016 15:01, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi,
What I hear is that the intentions were wrong in that you did not
anticipate people to get actual meaningful requests out of it.

When you state "we have two choices", you imply that it is my choice as
well. It is not. The answer that I am looking for is yes, it does not
function as we would like, we are working on it and in the mean time we
will ensure that toolkit is available on Labs for the more complex queries.

Wikidata is a service and the service is in need of being better.

Gerard, do you realise how far away from technical reality your wishes are? We are far ahead of the state of the art in what we already have for Wikidata: two powerful live query services + a free toolkit for batch analyses + several Web APIs for live lookups. I know of no site of this scale that is anywhere near this in terms of functionality. You can always ask for more, but you should be a bit reasonable too, or people will just ignore you.

Markus

On 11 February 2016 at 12:32, Daniel Kinzler
<daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de <mailto:daniel.kinzler@wikimedia.de>> wrote:

Am 11.02.2016 um 10:17 schrieb Gerard Meijssen:
> Your response is technical and seriously, query is a tool and it should function
> for people. When the tool is not good enough fix it.

What I hear: "A hammer is a tool, it should work for people. Tearing
down a
building with it takes forever, so fix the hammer!"

The query service was never intended to run arbitrarily large or complex
queries. Sure, would be nice, but that also means committing an
arbitrary amount
of resources to a single request. We don't have arbitrary amounts of
resources.

We basically have two choices: either we offer a limited interface
that only
allows for a narrow range of queries to be run at all. Or we offer a
very
general interface that can run arbitrary queries, but we impose
limits on time
and memory consumption. I would actually prefer the first option,
because it's
more predictable, and doesn't get people's hopes up too far. What do
you think?

Oh, and +1 for making it easy to use WDT on labs.

--
Daniel Kinzler
Senior Software Developer

Wikimedia Deutschland
Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.

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