Hi,
Geekiness warning: this email mentions software in general and free software licenses in particular. It mentions them because it's a useful example, but the ideas can be applied to many other domains.
Automatic generation of list articles is frequently named as one of the main use cases of Wikidata. There is, however, a particular type of list articles for which Wikidata may be even more useful: Comparison articles. You can find many examples of these at Category:Software comparisons in the English Wikipedia.
It can be used for comparing cars, athletes, political candidates and many other things. I frequently use such articles to help myself choose software that I will use. Here's what I do today to search for software, and what I would love to see supported better using Wikidata:
* I always prefer to try Free Software first. Today I usually go to such an article, sort the table by the license column, and then start comparing features that are important to me. * Very often the different groups of features appear in different tables, so I have to scroll up and down a lot. * Very often I quickly narrow down my search to a small number of products, but there's no easy way to remove the products that I decided not to use from the view, so again I have to scroll up and down a lot.
Doing the above using a query would be very useful. I would be able to quickly eliminate rows (products) and columns (features) that don't interest me.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On 30.09.2012 07:47, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Automatic generation of list articles is frequently named as one of the main use cases of Wikidata. There is, however, a particular type of list articles for which Wikidata may be even more useful: Comparison articles. You can find many examples of these at Category:Software comparisons in the English Wikipedia.
Interesting use case, thanks for mentioning it!
I think this functionality can be implemented on top of the "normal" list functionality, using a bit of JavaScript for sorting, filtering and picking columns. The only thing to worry about is the view a user would get with JS disabled. That may be several hundred lines and dozens of columns.
As the system is currently designed, real-time queries to the backend will not be supported, at least not right away. So the filtering would have to happen on the client, using JavaScript. But if the base set to work on does not exceed something like a thousand entries, this should work fine. But we'll have such a limit anyway, to avoid gigantic pages listing every person known to Wikidata, etc.
-- daniel
PS: interestingly, there seem to be rather few Wikipedias that even allow this kind of (non-)articles. [[Category:Software comparisons]] has 10 interlanguage links (and no equivalent in German, Dutch, or Japanese), [[Category:Computing_comparisons]] has 4, [[Category:Technological_comparison]] has 1; [[Category:Comparisons]] has 12, but again no equivalent in German or Dutch (Japanese does have this).