7 ms·

Wikidata

77 points by kjhughes 14y ago

bendmorris 14y ago
Am I missing something? Wikidata talks big, but apparently it only contains lists of different language versions of Wikipedia articles. (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction#What_do_we_have_so_far.3F https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction#What_do_...) There doesn't seem to be any sort of codified plan forward, so I'm not sure what to think of it.
- prosody 14y ago
  You might want to dig into the documentation on the Wikimedia Meta site: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
- ZeroGravitas 14y ago
  The initial goals don't seem world changing, but maybe at Wikipedia scale they could be: We are working on three major things: 1. Centralizing language links 2. Providing a central place for infobox data for all Wikipedias 3. Creating and updating list articles based on data in Wikidata In particular I imagine this will have an initial impact of massively increasing the quality of the lesser used Wiki languages, by leveraging the work on the busier sites.
kenjackson 14y ago
I was just thinking about something like this today (or at least what I think this might be, since I really can't tell from the page). Here is what I want... I want a way to query and download Wikipedia metadata easily. For example, I recently saw the Burke Museum released an Wildflower App, but none for Windows Phone. I was thinking I could use Wikipedia to build a very similar app, but I needed to get access to hierarchical metadata (flower type, color, region of the world, environment, etc...). I suspect it's largely there in Wikipedia, but it's not structured (or at least I don't know how to query it). I can imagine this being of use for a lot of things: plants, birds, fish, basketball, football, countries, presidents, trees, foods, etc... Has this been done already? Is it a solved problem with Wikipedia already?
- riffraff 14y ago
  check out dbpedia's sparql endpoint, or freebase's apis
- jpswade 14y ago
  Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of certain data types (for example, birth dates) which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for media files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ScraperWiki is a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wiki" means that any user with programming experience can create or edit such programs for extracting new data, or for analyzing existing datasets. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki
- mjn 14y ago
  That is the direction Wikidata is intending to go, yes. But it doesn't have a lot of semantic data in it yet. In the meantime, some other options that might be useful: There's another Wikimedia Foundation project specifically for species taxonomy: http://species.wikimedia.org http://species.wikimedia.org As 'riffraff mentioned there's a project, DBpedia, which is based on extracting structured data by parsing Wikipedia infoboxes: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About For certain kinds of queries the Wikipedia category system already provides some semi-structured data, e.g. you can consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots to get a list of some famous fictional parrots. You can query by category programmatically using the MediaWiki API http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > 'riffraff Completely OT, but is this an established HN convention for marking usernames? I've noticed it here and there, and it seems like a goodish idea.
tzury 14y ago
Universe https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1 Earth https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q2 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q2 Life https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3
- josso 14y ago
  Douglas Adams https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42
csmatt 14y ago
I'm thinking this is a one-stop-shop for public datasets? Maybe for when you're reading an article on something like 'gun violence in urban areas', but want to see stats from multiple studies on the topic. That's my best guess and I can see that solving the problem of trying to reference data from studies in a unified way.
kissickas 14y ago
Noscript users, or in case anyone else sees lots of numbers like "Q1969448" instead of data values in the tables (articles?): Wikidata apparently requires javascript but doesn't make it clear. Allow scripts and refresh.
gburt 14y ago
For those who are confused (many of the posts currently appear to be), this seems like it is an attempt to semantic-ize Wikipedia-style definitions. For example, representing a term as: Earth "is a" planet "belongs to" the solar system, "has" [properties X, Y, Z]. This has applications in natural language processing and other types of artificial intelligence (for example, within a particular niche, it could be useful in an expert system). Think about this type of thing as a complex graph representing "knowledge" in some abstract but still useful sense.
- anvandare 14y ago
  Also known as faceted classification.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification
kristopher 14y ago
Entry Q13: triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q13 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q13
gioele 14y ago
Previous HN discussion (50 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775212 Commentary by The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-pr...
gioele 14y ago
(Repost of part of my previous comment, still valid, I think) Wikidata, just like Freebase, is trying to collect structured or semi-structured data instead of unstructured data such as that present in Wikipedia. I am happy about the aim (completely unstructured data is basically useless for any serious data reuse and data extraction) but my fear is that they will not succeed as well as they did with Wikipedia. Wikipedia funded its success on the fact that anybody could edit it. In order to edit a wikipedia page you only need very low technical skills and basic writing skills (plus knowledge of the topic, obviously). Adding and manipulating structured data requires people to obey to a certain mental grid, to a formalized model, to a schema developed by someone and put in place to be respected strictly. The vast majority of people is easily demotivated when they are required to learn something substantial beforehand and most of the edits of unskilled users end up removed by watchdog (something seen often in high quality Wikipedia articles: edits made by new users are quickly reverted on the grounds that they did not follow some of the many guidelines that must be followed). My idea is that many problems found in structured-data projects (FreeBase, MusicBrainz...) could be alleviated by better interfaces and a wide use of automation, both things that Wikipedia projects do not seem to excel in.
- epaulson 14y ago
  Users and computers can here. Let any unskilled user make a change. There are plenty of editors who just watch the changelog and fix things up for grammer or for NPV violations, and now that can include include incorporating it into the structured data. In the future, bots using some kind of NLP can scour over the changes and look for new facts to extract and incorporate, either by suggesting features to editors or to just make the change themselves.

77 points by kjhughes 14y ago

Am I missing something? Wikidata talks big, but apparently it only contains lists of different language versions of Wikipedia articles. (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction#What_do_we_have_so_far.3F https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction#What_do_...) There doesn't seem to be any sort of codified plan forward, so I'm not sure what to think of it.

prosody 14y ago
You might want to dig into the documentation on the Wikimedia Meta site: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
The initial goals don't seem world changing, but maybe at Wikipedia scale they could be: We are working on three major things: 1. Centralizing language links 2. Providing a central place for infobox data for all Wikipedias 3. Creating and updating list articles based on data in Wikidata In particular I imagine this will have an initial impact of massively increasing the quality of the lesser used Wiki languages, by leveraging the work on the busier sites.

kenjackson 14y ago

I was just thinking about something like this today (or at least what I think this might be, since I really can't tell from the page). Here is what I want... I want a way to query and download Wikipedia metadata easily. For example, I recently saw the Burke Museum released an Wildflower App, but none for Windows Phone. I was thinking I could use Wikipedia to build a very similar app, but I needed to get access to hierarchical metadata (flower type, color, region of the world, environment, etc...). I suspect it's largely there in Wikipedia, but it's not structured (or at least I don't know how to query it). I can imagine this being of use for a lot of things: plants, birds, fish, basketball, football, countries, presidents, trees, foods, etc... Has this been done already? Is it a solved problem with Wikipedia already?

riffraff 14y ago
check out dbpedia's sparql endpoint, or freebase's apis
jpswade 14y ago
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of certain data types (for example, birth dates) which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for media files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ScraperWiki is a web-based platform for collaboratively building programs to extract and analyze public (online) data, in a wiki-like fashion. "Scraper" refers to screen scrapers, programs that extract data from websites. "Wiki" means that any user with programming experience can create or edit such programs for extracting new data, or for analyzing existing datasets. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScraperWiki
mjn 14y ago
That is the direction Wikidata is intending to go, yes. But it doesn't have a lot of semantic data in it yet. In the meantime, some other options that might be useful: There's another Wikimedia Foundation project specifically for species taxonomy: http://species.wikimedia.org http://species.wikimedia.org As 'riffraff mentioned there's a project, DBpedia, which is based on extracting structured data by parsing Wikipedia infoboxes: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About For certain kinds of queries the Wikipedia category system already provides some semi-structured data, e.g. you can consult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_parrots to get a list of some famous fictional parrots. You can query by category programmatically using the MediaWiki API http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page
- saraid216 14y ago
  > 'riffraff Completely OT, but is this an established HN convention for marking usernames? I've noticed it here and there, and it seems like a goodish idea.

tzury 14y ago

Universe https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1 Earth https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q2 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q2 Life https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q3

josso 14y ago
Douglas Adams https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42

csmatt 14y ago

I'm thinking this is a one-stop-shop for public datasets? Maybe for when you're reading an article on something like 'gun violence in urban areas', but want to see stats from multiple studies on the topic. That's my best guess and I can see that solving the problem of trying to reference data from studies in a unified way.

kissickas 14y ago

Noscript users, or in case anyone else sees lots of numbers like "Q1969448" instead of data values in the tables (articles?): Wikidata apparently requires javascript but doesn't make it clear. Allow scripts and refresh.

gburt 14y ago

For those who are confused (many of the posts currently appear to be), this seems like it is an attempt to semantic-ize Wikipedia-style definitions. For example, representing a term as: Earth "is a" planet "belongs to" the solar system, "has" [properties X, Y, Z]. This has applications in natural language processing and other types of artificial intelligence (for example, within a particular niche, it could be useful in an expert system). Think about this type of thing as a complex graph representing "knowledge" in some abstract but still useful sense.

anvandare 14y ago
Also known as faceted classification.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

kristopher 14y ago

Entry Q13: triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13) https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q13 https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q13

gioele 14y ago

Previous HN discussion (50 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775212 Commentary by The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-problem-with-wikidata/255564/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-pr...

gioele 14y ago

(Repost of part of my previous comment, still valid, I think) Wikidata, just like Freebase, is trying to collect structured or semi-structured data instead of unstructured data such as that present in Wikipedia. I am happy about the aim (completely unstructured data is basically useless for any serious data reuse and data extraction) but my fear is that they will not succeed as well as they did with Wikipedia. Wikipedia funded its success on the fact that anybody could edit it. In order to edit a wikipedia page you only need very low technical skills and basic writing skills (plus knowledge of the topic, obviously). Adding and manipulating structured data requires people to obey to a certain mental grid, to a formalized model, to a schema developed by someone and put in place to be respected strictly. The vast majority of people is easily demotivated when they are required to learn something substantial beforehand and most of the edits of unskilled users end up removed by watchdog (something seen often in high quality Wikipedia articles: edits made by new users are quickly reverted on the grounds that they did not follow some of the many guidelines that must be followed). My idea is that many problems found in structured-data projects (FreeBase, MusicBrainz...) could be alleviated by better interfaces and a wide use of automation, both things that Wikipedia projects do not seem to excel in.

epaulson 14y ago
Users and computers can here. Let any unskilled user make a change. There are plenty of editors who just watch the changelog and fix things up for grammer or for NPV violations, and now that can include include incorporating it into the structured data. In the future, bots using some kind of NLP can scour over the changes and look for new facts to extract and incorporate, either by suggesting features to editors or to just make the change themselves.