Hi all,

I'm not yet sure about the real purpose of the wikidata project.

Currently I feel a (or the?) main part is the data entry.

I welcome a reasonable and simplified approach. I guess, a form based entry is the most obvious solution. But I'm not sure about the appropriate Wiki syntax for the 'expert' mode where everything is open to extended definitions. I feel the syntax should be closer to XML instead of HTML commands, since XHTML2 becomes more and more stable. I guess that there's not much help to implement a new syntax without upcoming standards in mind.

However, I expect a rather different result from wikidata: I'd like to access not only one fixed set of data, but I'd expect an overview of multiple records, presented as a table.

I want to filter many records and limit the search to a subset. I want to sort those records by one or multiple sort fields.

There are many more conclusions drawn from this expectation, such as - search and replace operation on multiple records - normalization of entries - language conversion - display variations (e.g. abbreviated, columns with markers instead of field contents, html-table or preformatted text, reordering of columns, subset of columns, transformation, ...) - maybe one could even implement spreadsheet like field entry options - custom sort orders - search ranges (e.g. depending on field types) - ...

But the main request here is: wikidata should be able to merge info from multiple sources into one table overview.

I know about several projects which work this way on wikipedia. One of them is to filter all wikipedia geo coordinates and put them into one extracted format. I don't know about the operation after: Could I see this extracted info in wikipedia/wikidata itself? Could I limit my view of the full set of data (several thousand records) e.g. to a limited range (e.g. an area within a certain range). Could I fix errors in this subset? And would those modification be updated back to the original sources?

I guess, it COULD be done - in theory. I don't know yet whether this is one of the goals of wikidata.

Thanks, Martin