I *am* a fan of structured, semantic databases like wikidata, but that's not what I'm talking about.
In highly structured databases, adding properties that may be useful for your research and the work of others would require altering the structure itself, like adding a field, for example. That isn't easy, because the powers that be have to first agree that it is appropriate, worthy, and fits correctly in to the ontology. If there is a type hierarchy, then the sample set would probably have to conform to a sub-tree in the type hierarchy which may not correspond well to the sample set that the researcher is actually interested in.
I'm talking about the exact opposite, actually. Unstructured databases can be easily altered and indexed in much more flexible ways. The indices for these databases wouldn't normally be stored with the data itself; the researchers would get a data dump and create the indices needed for their own studies. Conventions would be enforced if the researchers wish to contribute anything back.
Most importantly, if I understand correctly, wikidata is a secondary database that doesn't correspond one-to-one with Wikipedia articles yet, and it's not clear to me whether it ever will. While it might be interesting to someone using the data collected in Wikipedia and imported in wikidata for semantic-oriented research like basic AI that would help computers win on Jeopardy, it wouldn't be interesting to someone studying Wikipedia itself.
,Wil
On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 10:10 PM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
I imagine this isn't the first time someone has thrown something like this in to the Wikipedosphere. If so, what did people think? If not, what do you guys think? :)
,Wil
I think it sounds a little bit like wikidata.org, with some innovation of potential future applications. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe