On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ? Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/3 Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org
We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data.
For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language.
Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository.
--michael
I think Michael Dale said the same thing. He was just saying that perhaps we could have a central wiki (based on SMW) to hold the data, and allow the individual projects to use ExternalData to grab the data into the presentation format of their choice. Not a terrible idea, IMO :)
Combining enwiki and frwiki into one mega-pedia isn't the best idea. Each wiki should be free to not only decide content as they so choose, but also to use the presentation they prefer. However, there's no need to duplicate raw facts as mentioned, so a central wiki of the raw facts query-able by ExternalData would serve this purpose. Allow wikis to retain their autonomy, but give them access to centralized data that doesn't change in different languages.
-Chad