Hi,
Geekiness warning: this email mentions software in general and free
software licenses in particular. It mentions them because it's a
useful example, but the ideas can be applied to many other domains.
Automatic generation of list articles is frequently named as one of
the main use cases of Wikidata. There is, however, a particular type
of list articles for which Wikidata may be even more useful:
Comparison articles. You can find many examples of these at
Category:Software comparisons in the English Wikipedia.
It can be used for comparing cars, athletes, political candidates and
many other things. I frequently use such articles to help myself
choose software that I will use. Here's what I do today to search for
software, and what I would love to see supported better using
Wikidata:
* I always prefer to try Free Software first. Today I usually go to
such an article, sort the table by the license column, and then start
comparing features that are important to me.
* Very often the different groups of features appear in different
tables, so I have to scroll up and down a lot.
* Very often I quickly narrow down my search to a small number of
products, but there's no easy way to remove the products that I
decided not to use from the view, so again I have to scroll up and
down a lot.
Doing the above using a query would be very useful. I would be able to
quickly eliminate rows (products) and columns (features) that don't
interest me.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore