Hi Gregor,
the main reply to your concerns is that we are not ruling out that further things will be done once the basic system is in place. Most of the doors that you mention will remain open. The approach in Wikidata is to deliver results early and frequently to the community. Therefore, we have deliberately limited our scope in various ways, focussing on our core tasks. This will already cover a huge amount of hitherto unmanaged data, and it already bears many challenges that need to be addressed first. But we certainly hope that this is only the starting point for Wikidata.
Cheers,
Markus
On 01/04/12 21:25, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
On 1 April 2012 13:04, Markus Krötzschmarkus.kroetzsch@cs.ox.ac.uk wrote:
This is a valid point. It is intended to address this as follows:
- Wikidata items (our "content pages") will be in *exact* correspondence to
(zero or more) Wikipedia articles in different languages.
- Differences in scope will lead to different Wikidata items.
- Relationships such as "broader" or "narrower" can be expressed as
relations between these items, if desired.
This is a technically valid solution. Socially, I fear it would lead to endless uncertainty which mechanism to use. Few abstract entities will have exactly the same delimitation/width, but where should one switch from one method of linking (one wikidata page with several more less closely matching wikipedia pages) to the other (several wikidata pages, one for each wikipedia page in each language)?
Also, importing data will be a nightmare, because the concepts used in imported data will have to be compared with all wikipedias. One Wikipedia-language-version has the post-WWII extent of Russia as well as the current and another Wikipedia-language-version has them separated. It may not have mattered before and only one Wikidata page links to both language-versions. However at some point historical data are imported and suddently Wikidata needs to be reorganized to have two pages. ... Just thinking loud - this may be unavoidable perhaps...
However, my gut feeling is that if you plan to avoid relations between Wikidata and Wikipedia, it might be a more comprehensible model to then always using only one method, i.e. have a 0 to 1 or 1 to 1 relation between Wikidata page and Wikipedia page only, and express everything else in Wikidata to Wikidata page relations. These relations are then easily traceable and updateable, just as the broadness or narrowness of a page in a given Wikipedia develops over time.
In general, Wikidata will not be able to replace all interwiki links: it will remain possible to define additional links in each Wikipedia to cover cases where the relationship between articles is not exact.
This worries me. It means that there will be forever conflicting systems of editing interwiki links. If everything can be achieved with Wikipedia, but only a subset with Wikidata, it spells social adoption danger.