[Foundation-l] Wikidata

[John Vandenberg]

It looks like a solution to bug 4547 is on the horizon.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4547

See also [Wikitech-l] Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/197322

This will be very useful for templates which Commons has developed,
especially language related templates, however I am concerned that
people are also planning on using Commons as a repo for Wikipedia
infoboxes, and including the *data* on Commons rather than just the
template code.  e.g.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Peter17/GSoc_2010#Interest

This centralisation of data makes sense on many levels, however using
Commons as the host of this data will result in many edit wars moving
to the Commons project, involving people from many languages.  Even
the infobox structure can be the cause of edit wars.

I think it is undesirable to have these Wikipedia problems added to
Commons existing problems. ;-)

Tying Wikipedia and Commons closer together is also problematic when
we consider the differing audience and scope of each project,
especially in light of the recent media problems.  If the core
templates and data used by Wikipedia are hosted/modified on Commons,
it will be more difficult to justify why Commons accepts content which
isn't appropriate on Wikipedia.

A centralised data wiki has been proposed previously, many times:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/historical
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_%282%29
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiDatabank

Non-WMF projects, such as freebase, dbpedia, etc., have been exploring
this space.

Isn't it time that we started a new project!? ;-)

A wikidata project could use semantic mediawiki from the outset, and
be seeded with data from dbpedia.

A lot of existing & proposed projects would benefit from a centralised
wikidata project.  e.g. a genealogy wiki could use the relationships
stored on the wikidata project.  wikisource and commons could use the
central data wiki for their Author and Creator details.

--
John Vandenberg