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Binaris, Oren,<br><br>
At 13:43 02/04/2012, Oren Bochman wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">WikiData’s mandate appears to be
to improve en.Wikipedia (and then the other WMF projects). If WikiData
cannot serve the needs of en.wikipedia it will be of little consequence
to the other projects since it will need a community to maintain.
</blockquote></blockquote> <br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">This is a new piece of
information for me. Does enwiki really have any priority to other
Wikipedias? :-O I would be unhappy with that.</blockquote><br>
My point is a pragmatic</b> one – not a political</b> one. Note that
Wikidata is planned to add language prototypes in the third part of the
time line - that is my reference.<br>
<br>
If you read my note you will notice I propose to take a realistic
view of the communities. It would be a mistake to forget that
en.wikipeia is where the bulk of the information exists, the largest
community and the source of the most difficult policies i.e. the
greatest challenges.<br>
<br>
However getting data into Wikidata is only half of the problem. To get it
out as to ar...zu.Wikpedias without causing chaos -- is what we are here
to figure out.</blockquote><br>
We have a good experience of that type of problem with the "layer
below": languages (data are to be expressed in a language). This is
why I raised the point with Lydia and helped her in asking for a more
organized road map when she said she did not fully understand.<br><br>
This experience has been with the Governance (countries, and languages),
with the character sets (ISO 10646 and Unicode), with the langtags (RFC
5646) and filtering (RFC 4647), with the non-ASCII domain names and mail
addresses. In theses cases we met with the interlinguistic (languages),
inter-readibility (scripts), interconnectibility (infrastructure) and the
interoperability (protocols) issues which made the Internet so far. The
Internet+ layer set is new, in use, and clear but by far not stabilized
yet (I quoted the IETF Drafts on this) . It concerns fringe to fringe
interintelligibility (the next upper network stratum will be the Intersem
(semiotic Internet, the Internet of thoughts) which is my main interest
with auxiliary intelligence (not for today !)) <br><br>
Wikimedia follows the same strata advancement, but on top of the web
application. This means that three fundamental questions are raised by
the Wikidata project: <br><br>
1. is it technically to be a web or a network+ application (this has no
impact on the content, but this does impact the architectural and
referential issues and the future of the Intersem).<br>
2. how is to be interintelligible: in being internationalized (the
leading culture hosts the others) or multilingualised (every language is
treated equal).<br>
3. how is it going to support (actually not to block further innovation
in) intercomprehensibility i.e. to be able to address the Intersem
stratum "capital of Israel" issue. <br><br>
Point 1 : is to decide who (humanists or technicalists) are to be the
leaders in the Wikidata specifications.<br><br>
Point 2 : is to decide if we address the logical needs of en.wiki and
then propagate the solutions to the other languages, or if we actually
are pragmatic and acknowledge that the need is for a multilingual system.
So, we try first to address this fully new problem among a limited set of
wikis (let say the three leading ones [amenable to ASCII, but with
diacritics] and then with a non-roman one.<br><br>
Point 3 : is to understand and accept the complexity that Wikidata is
having to face and to try not to over complexify its future with today's
"great" solutions and habits.<br><br>
Examples: <br><br>
1. Network related issues may become a first nightmare as many URIs will
become IRIs (different scripts) and the digital convergence will need to
use DNS CLASSes, at least between different technologies. This means both
that en.wiki will have to support URI/IRI indifferently. English
contributors have no Chinese keyboards. CLASSes are not even supported
yet in the way to publish a domain name. The more communications layers,
the more complexity, the less security, the less room and power in mobile
devices.<br><br>
2. The ISO and IETF experience shows that the
multicultural/multilinguistic issue is already very complex to
architecturally and technically address (it took ten years, and it is not
by far digested) due to people intuitive agreements with stereotypes. The
Network side solution to this complexity is "subsidiarity"
(i.e. the current Wikipedia solution). Wikidata has therefore to be
conceived as a service to subsidiarity (the wikimedia and the Internet+
ones).<br><br>
3. Then, the third problem no one has addressed yet except ISO 3166, is
variance : two identical particulars (effects, names, data, etc.) may be
different. eg. there are many ways to compute and present the same date.
Are the results to be stored in Wikidata in all these ways every day and
bridges to be built? or are they to be stored as a single data with the
formulas to compute them, then how to be sure some parameters have not
changed (i.e. death of the Emperor) and computation was not tampered
with? Variance is everywhere (actually variance is most probably Life).
ISO 3166 has no variance, because it is the sovereign reference: the list
of States and laws languages (however, Palestine is in it already, Taiwan
is there). ISO documents are in French, English and possibly in Russian.
ISO 3166:1 states which are the normative languages in every country by
reference to ISO 639 (list of language names). ISO 3166 defines the
ccTLDs and is used in langtags to document languages and cultures. ISO
10646 (supported by UNICODE) is the scripts character coded tables. At
binary layer it is full of variants (same graphs being supported by
different code points). <br>
<br>
Best<br>
jfc<br>
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