Hoi,
I have waited for some time to reply. FIrst of all. Wikidata is not your
average data repository. It would not be as relevant as it is if it were
not for the fact that it links Wikipedia articles of any language to
statements on items.
This is the essence of Wikidata. After that we can all complain about the
fallacies of Wikidata.. I have my pet pieves and it is not your RDF SPARQL
and stuff. That is mostly stuff for academics and it its use is largely
academic and not useful on the level where I want progress. Exposing this
information to PEOPLE is what I am after and by and large they do not live
in the ivory towers where RDF and SPARQL live.
I am delighted to learn that a production grade replacement of WDQ is being
worked on. I am delighted that a front-end (javascript) ? developers is
being sought. That is what it takes to bring the sum of al knowledge to all
people. It is in enriching the data in Wikidata not in yet another pet
project where we can make a difference because that is what the people will
see. When SPARQL is available with Wikidata data.. do wonder how you would
serve all the readers of Wikipedia.. Does SPARQL sparkle enough when it is
challenged in this way ?
Thanks,
GerardM
On 18 February 2015 at 21:25, Paul Houle <ontology2(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What bugs me about it is that Wikidata has gone down
the same road as
Freebase and Neo4J in the sense of developing something ad-hoc that is not
well understood.
I understand the motivations that lead there, because there are
requirements to meet that standards don't necessarily satisfy, plus
Wikidata really is doing ambitious things in the sense of capturing
provenance information.
Perhaps it has come a little too late to help with Wikidata but it seems
to me that RDF* and SPARQL* have a lot to offer for "data wikis" in that
you can view data as plain ordinary RDF and query with SPARQL but you can
also attach provenance and other metadata in a sane way with sweet syntax
for writing it in Turtle or querying it in other ways.
Another way of thinking about it is that RDF* is formalizing the property
graph model which has always been ad hoc in products like Neo4J. I can say
that knowing what the algebra is you are implementing helps a lot in
getting the tools to work right. So you not only have SPARQL queries as a
possibility but also languages like Gremlin and Cypher and this is all
pretty exciting. It is also exciting that vendors are getting on board
with this and we are going to seeing some stuff that is crazy scalable (way
past 10^12 facts on commodity hardware) very soon.
On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Jeroen De Dauw <jeroendedauw(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hey,
As Lydia mentioned, we obviously do not actively discourage outside
contributions, and will gladly listen to suggestions on how we can do
better. That being said, we are actively taking steps to make it easier for
developers not already part of the community to start contributing.
For instance, we created a website about our software itself [0], which
lists the MediaWiki extensions and the different libraries [1] we created.
For most of our libraries, you can just clone the code and run composer
install. And then you're all set. You can make changes, run the tests and
submit them back. Different workflow than what you as MediaWiki developer
are used to perhaps, though quite a bit simpler. Furthermore, we've been
quite progressive in adopting practices and tools from the wider PHP
community.
I definitely do not disagree with you that some things could, and should,
be improved. Like you I'd like to see the Wikibase git repository and
naming of the extensions be aligned more, since it indeed is confusing.
Increased API stability, especially the JavaScript one, is something else
on my wish-list, amongst a lot of other things. There are always reasons of
why things are the way they are now and why they did not improve yet. So I
suggest to look at specific pain points and see how things can be improved
there. This will get us much further than looking at the general state,
concluding people do not want third party contributions, and then
protesting against that.
[0]
http://wikiba.se/
[1]
http://wikiba.se/components/
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw -
http://www.bn2vs.com
Software craftsmanship advocate
Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3
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Paul Houle
Expert on Freebase, DBpedia, Hadoop and RDF
(607) 539 6254 paul.houle on Skype ontology2(a)gmail.com
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