Hoi,

You are right. However, Hay was critiqued for his approach. Arguably he is absolutely using the right approach for his use case.

When you state that people have to go back to Wikidata, it is easier to search for a label than it is to search for an ID. When you are developing software and you use whatever technology, please appreciate that in the final analysis what you create is to be used. JSON, the REST API are for developers but it is a technique not a tool. What Hay demonstrates is a usable tool.

Thanks,

GerardM

On 1 December 2015 at 09:14, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi!

> It may not be stable but it is what PEOPLE understand. What you can do

This is not as simple as it seems. First, people usually understand only
one language version - thus, we'd have 200 URIs referring to the same
object, but that's not the main issue I see with it. The main issue is
that the name is not always trivial to guess - so you'd have to go to
wikidata and look it up anyway (especially if not all languages are
supported). And, also, if you use English name and somebody uses Russian
interface, they may not even know that's the same property without
looking up on Wikidata.
So yes, when displaying, label is what people want. But when using the
API - not so sure.

> <grin> I salute the effort and I appreciate the critique </grin> however
> many approaches do not have ordinary people in mind but are from ones
> own perspective. When that is of a developer of a data scientist it is
> often correct but hardly usable.

What you mean by "ordinary people" here? If you mean random person
selected out of 7 billions living on a planet, chances are they won't
know the first thing about what REST API is, what JSON is and what that
thing is all about. So we are talking about very specific narrow
category of people who do know what REST API is and need it and know how
to use it. So you can make some assumptions here which are not true in
general population, but may be true amongst REST-API-using population.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@wikimedia.org

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