5 ms·

Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves. People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia doe

by j-pb 5y ago

Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves. People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does. Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value. The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will. In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.

kqr 5y ago
Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important. If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow. Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides. If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival. Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
- j-pb 5y ago
  Wikipedia exploded over night. The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
    - j-pb 5y ago
      Ah yes, and that's not totally skewed by the fact that an "edit" in a knowledge graph is at the granulatity of a triple while an edit in an article has the granulatity of a coherent piece of structurally meaningfull information. Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        It might be a "garbage dump", but it's one that large pieces of the Web are increasingly relying on. The pre-existing alternatives (mainly DBpedia - incidentally, based on scraping Wikipedia articles) were pretty disgusting hacks compared to what we have now.
zozbot234 5y ago
> People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does. On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there. Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.
- j-pb 5y ago
  Using RDF to store multiple languages of the same article is gross overengineering. Interlinking with other projects isn't nessecary when there are no other projects.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y. Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board with the system, but its been a big boon to smaller languages). As a result, people can update these "facts" independently of language, keeping them altogether more up to date, and it allows the data to be queried independently (via https://query.wikidata.org https://query.wikidata.org - try some of the example queries (button top left) if you haven't, the level of power SPARQL gives for querying this type of data set really is very cool). Part of Wikimedia's mission is to spread knowledge. Allowing querying of factual data with a query language like sparql helps advance that goal by letting people use extract the knowledge for new purposes.
    - j-pb 5y ago
      > its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y Like I said, gross overengineering. "You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"
NoInkling 5y ago
I use Wikidata data (in a non-academic capacity) shrug It's not that easy to work with, but there aren't any good alternatives in my case. Freebase died. DBpedia doesn't compare. Domain-specific databases don't have the data I'm looking for (or it's woefully incomplete and/or hard to link to external entities) because it straddles multiple domains, not to mention they're usually not free. I for one am very thankful for Wikidata existing and seeing good activity.
- metasj 5y ago
  Nice (& same!) How do you use it that you couldn't use dbpedia?

by j-pb 5y ago

kqr 5y ago

Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important. If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow. Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides. If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival. Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.

j-pb 5y ago
Wikipedia exploded over night. The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    Ah yes, and that's not totally skewed by the fact that an "edit" in a knowledge graph is at the granulatity of a triple while an edit in an article has the granulatity of a coherent piece of structurally meaningfull information. Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      It might be a "garbage dump", but it's one that large pieces of the Web are increasingly relying on. The pre-existing alternatives (mainly DBpedia - incidentally, based on scraping Wikipedia articles) were pretty disgusting hacks compared to what we have now.

zozbot234 5y ago

> People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does. On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there. Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.

j-pb 5y ago
Using RDF to store multiple languages of the same article is gross overengineering. Interlinking with other projects isn't nessecary when there are no other projects.
- bawolff 5y ago
  It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y. Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board with the system, but its been a big boon to smaller languages). As a result, people can update these "facts" independently of language, keeping them altogether more up to date, and it allows the data to be queried independently (via https://query.wikidata.org https://query.wikidata.org - try some of the example queries (button top left) if you haven't, the level of power SPARQL gives for querying this type of data set really is very cool). Part of Wikimedia's mission is to spread knowledge. Allowing querying of factual data with a query language like sparql helps advance that goal by letting people use extract the knowledge for new purposes.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    > its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y Like I said, gross overengineering. "You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"

NoInkling 5y ago

I use Wikidata data (in a non-academic capacity) shrug It's not that easy to work with, but there aren't any good alternatives in my case. Freebase died. DBpedia doesn't compare. Domain-specific databases don't have the data I'm looking for (or it's woefully incomplete and/or hard to link to external entities) because it straddles multiple domains, not to mention they're usually not free. I for one am very thankful for Wikidata existing and seeing good activity.

metasj 5y ago
Nice (& same!) How do you use it that you couldn't use dbpedia?