Magnus Manske wrote: <snip stop depressing!>
As good "wiki-fiddlers" (thanks so much, Register!) we would like to see every change in WikiData on the wikipedia pages real soon. Like, now. So the information that something changes, and what changed, has to pass from the data site to the display site. There are two ways to do that: push or pull.
PUSH means the data site will notify the display site that something has changed, and the display needs to be updated. For that, the data site has to know which pages of the display site are affected by which change. Then, it has to notify the display site of this. Bad things:
- Needs basically a cache of *all* queries *ever* asked of the data
site, as well as their results
- Has to recalculate *all* of these after *every* change to find which
queries produce different results
- Won't work if the display site is offline
- Won't work well with non-wikipedias
That can't be it.
<snip PULL>
Hello,
I would personally PUSH datas from the wikidata to the content publishers (like wikipedia).
A lot of blog systems have a feature known as trackback. When someone publish an article wich contain reference to other blogs, its blog system will send a ping (known as XML/RPC ping) to the referenced blogs alerting them that their news got reused somewhere.
Simple example: Blog slashdot publish a news about nasa discovering martians.
MartianFan001 wich is part of a "Life on mars foundation" decide to publish a news about it and reference slashdot.
JohnDoe who like things about mars decide to publish a news on his personal blog and his article is something like:
<<The mars foundation [http://marsfoundation/newsid/113] report a news originally posted by [http://slashdot/?newsid=123912 slashdot] about life on Mars !>>
He submits that news to its blog engine that parse links and try to send pings to marsfoundation and slashdot saying : johndoe.com/newsid=5 reference your article !
When receiving this ping, marsfoundation and slashdot blogs can update their trackback list:
slashdot news #123912 referenced by: "GeekHideout", "Nerds.com", "Mars foundation"
Marsfoundation news 113 referenced by: News referenced by: "JohnDoe"
So when some site wants to use wikidatas, it sends a query to the wikidata server associated with their internal reference (ex: name of the wikipedia article and language). Wikidata then send them the requested data and the wikidata internal reference.
When a wikidata is changed, the site send ping to every site referencing that set of data with the update. From there the site using data will answer wikidata with a code: 1/ data change acknowledged. 2/ no more need for this data, remove me. 3/ doesnt answer.
If it doesnt answer, there could be a system that queue the ping so it can be sent later (and eventualy be dropped after x days).
I believe the PULL method will generate too much traffic for datas wich are probably not meant to be changed between each view. Datas about species are probably much more stables than nasdaq stocks.
cheers,