Hi!
The benefits of having it in one instance are huge
imho. Our community
exists and knows how to handle structured data by now.
Processes/documentation/etc are set up. The world outside is starting
to realize that Wikidata is the place to go to for structured data
around Wikimedia now. And we probably do want easy connecting between
All this is true, but I don't see why this implies running only one
instance of wikibase. We could run another instance under the same
Wikidata umbrella, connect them (just as we are connecting other wikis
with Wikidata), share relevant documentation, etc. - neither of that
mandates running everything within the same database. I think we have a
lot of experience here of running services that are different
technically but unified by common goals and common purposes and linking
them.
items/properties/lexems etc. As we're talking
about different entity
types the data is easy enough to keep apart for those who want to.
I'm not sure how easy that would be - I've seen a lot of code that
assumes certain things work with all entities, now this code needs to be
reworked to work with only two types of entities, or support many other
types that behave very differently. And it's very easy to miss something
and not discover it until we launch it and tools start to break because
Lexems get into code that assumes something is either Item or Property.
And I'm not talking about internal PHP code only - there's a lot of
tools out there that neither WMF nor WMDE maintains. It's one thing to
make new service (which btw I think is an awesome idea, just wanted to
say it so that it would be clear than I am not criticizing the whole
idea, just this aspect of it) and another add subtle changes to an
existing one.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org