Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation since 2006

Re:Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation... by Alex3917 on Friday March 30, 2012 @08:14AM (#3775544)

This is actually a startup idea I've had for a while now. It's a great idea in theory, but it's very tricky in practice. Facts have a mysterious way of vanishing if you look closely enough at them, and the raw numbers themselves don't actually tell you anything.

The part that's actually interesting is:

- The methodology behind the numbers

- What we think is most likely the case based on the evidence available

- How each fact connects with other facts

- What we think we should do based on the evidence available

Being able to embed facts is definitely a cool use case, but unless you have all the other stuff backing it up when you click the link back to the database then it's pretty much worthless. And curating these sorts of epistemological discussions and third party analyses isn't something that really fits within the Wikimedia mission, so I doubt they will even try.

Because of this I doubt their implementation of the project will be successful, although I do think it's a space that ultimately has potential.

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Re:Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation... by david927 on Friday March 30, 2012 @10:09AM (#3775973)

You couldn't be more right, and I think the key here is: How each fact connects with other facts

If there were no operations, math would just be numbers on their own -- and what fun is that?

The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web, and after trying and failing to crack that nut for so long, everyone is turned off of it. Which is too bad, because what was failing was the approach. Trying several shipping routes to the New World and failing each time doesn't mean that the New World doesn't exist.

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Re:Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation... by Alex3917 on Friday March 30, 2012 @10:48AM (#3776165)

"The problem is that the relations turn it into the Semantic Web"

Not really. Assuming there are only four or five simple relationships like "Knowing fact X is necessary to understand fact Y", then the whole system isn't much more complicated than trackbacks for blog posts.

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Re:Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation... by david927 on Friday March 30, 2012 @11:14AM (#3776310)

If it was that simple, it would already have been solved. The problem is that relations are for any data point and they can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many; and mixes metadata with data seamlessly. It's a hard problem, make no mistake, but completely solvable. I have an approach I'm working on that I'll email you, if you're interested.

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Re:Wikidata: The first new project from Wikimedia Foundation... by Alex3917 on Friday March 30, 2012 @11:24AM (#3776369)

Sure, send me an email.

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