Hey Yaron, comments inline.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 3:15 PM Yaron Koren yaron@wikiworks.com wrote:
- I agree that it would be great to have autocompletion within the "select class" input. Similarly, I agree that it would be great to have free text inputs to let users specify arbitrary values when choosing filters and filter values, again with autocompletion, in the style of your VizQuery tool. These wouldn't replace the current interface, which just involves clicking, but I think they would be a nice complement to it. We didn't implement any autocompletion, in part because we didn't know how to do it, so it might be nice to steal some of your SDSearch code for that purpose.
You could make a combination of a Vue autosuggest component (i would suggest vue-simple-suggest) and the wbsearchentities API method to get the suggestions.
- It's true that queries can take a long time, especially for the classes with millions of items (like "human") and especially before a lot of filters have been applied. Using the API could be nice, if that works faster - I didn't know that was an option. Getting the Q code first, then the label, could also help with another big "to-do" item, which is being able to display items that don't have a label in the current language. Right now, the language is always English, and most Wikidata items do seem to have an English-language label, but there are still a lot of gaps. For example, there are 22,000 items whose class is "literary work" and whose genre is "Tang poetry", but only 20 (!) of them at the moment have an English-language label:
https://wikidatawalkabout.org/?c=Q7725634&f.P7937=Q482&f.P136=Q32369...
And, as I'm sure you know, the overall labelling coverage is much worse for all non-English languages. It would be great to get the item code first, then display the item in whatever language label is set for it.
Yes, this is always a bit of an issue. Also, it's nice to offer the interface in multiple languages (try https://tooltranslate.toolforge.org/ for that), so you could use that as the preferred label language, and then fetch other languages as well as a fallback.
That's also good to know about your "Tools Directory"! A pretty neat resource. We'll work on getting Wikidata Walkabout registered there.
Awesome!
Kind regards, -- Hay