Thank you for this e-mail. It was informative.
Stas Malyshev wrote:
No, and there are tricky parts there. Consider https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q735712. Yes, Lex Luthor held the office of the President of the USA. In a fictional universe, of course. But the naive query - every Wikidata item where position held includes "President of the United States" - would return Lex Luthor as the president as legitimate as Abraham Lincoln. In fact, there are 79 US presidents judging by "position held" alone. So clearly, there need to be some limits. And those limits would be on case-by-case basis.
Sure, but I'm not really worried about potential false positives. I'm worried that we're building a giant write-only data store.
Right now the best way is use one of the list-maintaining bots I think.
This sucks. :-(
Unless you're talking about pulling a small set of values, in which case Lua/templates are probably the best venue.
I'm not sure what small means here. We have about 46 U.S. Presidents, is that small enough? Which Lua functions and templates could I use?
We're working on it (mostly thinking right now, but correct design is 80% of the work, so...). Visualizations already have query capabilities (mainly because they have strong caching model embedded and because there are not too many of them and you need to create them so we can watch the load carefully). Other pages can gain them - probably via some kind of Lua functionality - as soon as we figure out what's the right way to do it, hopefully somewhere within the next year (no promise, but hopefully).
Wikidata began in October 2012. I thought it might take till 2014 or even 2015 to get querying capability into a usable state, but we're now looking at potentially 2018? This really sucks. I think Wikidata may eventually have a seismic shift on wiki editing, but currently I don't see any reason to even contribute to it when it feels like putting data into a giant system that you can't really get back out. I love Magnus and I have a ton of respect for him, but I don't want anything to do with anything called Listeria. It continues to seem like querying is an afterthought for Wikidata and this continues to boggle my mind.
MZMcBride