[Wikimedia-l] [Wikitech-l] Reasonator use in Wikipedias

[Ryan Lane]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
>
> At this moment Wikipedia "red links" provide no information whatsoever.
> This is not cool.
>
> In Wikidata we often have labels for the missing (=red link) articles. We
> can and do provide information from Wikidata in a reasonable way that is
> informative in the "Reasonator". We also provide additional search
> information on many Wikipedias.
>
> In the Reasonator we have now implemented "red lines" [1]. They indicate
> when a label does not exist in the primary language that is in use.
>
> What we are considering is creating a template {{Reasonator}} that will
> present information based on what is available in Wikidata. Such a template
> would be a stand in until an article is actually written. What we would
> provide is information that is presented in the same way as we provide it
> as this moment in time [2]
>
> This may open up a box of worms; Reasonator is NOT using any caching. There
> may be lots of other reasons why you might think this proposal is evil. All
> the evil that is technical has some merit but, you have to consider that
> the other side of the equation is that we are not "sharing in the sum of
> all knowledge" even when we have much of the missing requested information
> available to us.
>
> One saving (technical) grace, Reasonator loads round about as quickly as
> WIkidata does.
>
> As this is advance warning, I hope that you can help with the issues that
> will come about. I hope that you will consider the impact this will have on
> our traffic and measure to what extend it grows our data.
>
> The Reasonator pages will not show up prettily on mobile phones .. so does
> Wikidata by the way. It does not consider Wikipedia zero. There may be more
> issues that may require attention. But again, it beats not serving the
> information that we have to those that are requesting it.
>

I have a strong feeling you're going to bring labs to its knees.

Sending editors to labs is one thing, but you're proposing sending readers
to labs, to a service that isn't cached.

If reasonator is something we want to support for something like this,
maybe we should consider turning it into a production service?

- Ryan