On 11/23/2010 10:01 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote: > On 11/22/2010 10:24 PM, Michael Peel wrote: >> In my opinion, the Wikimedia Foundation should very seriously look into >> starting something like wikidata. > One major problem is that different people have very > differing understanding of what "wikidata" should mean. > It is an abstract good, similar to "world peace" or > "democracy" -- or Wikimedia's "usability" project, > that introduced slow and broken Javascript instead > of actually increasing usability. With this background > I would advise against starting a "wikidata" project. > > What should be started is something smaller and > more focused, that solves some actual problem. > This is like asking for "freedom of the press" or > "women's suffrage" rather than abstract "democracy". > > So, which concrete, smaller ambitions could you list? > >
Sure, but the problem small steps only address small problems and do not build a foundation to fix larger issues. A series of template hacks, bots and external indexers could address most small ambitions, but a unified underlining structure would bring many greater 'ambitions' within reach. For example if we just wrote a one off system to exclusively handle interlanguage links, it would not be nearly as useful as a system that tied these inerlanguage links together as multilingual labels for relational data. ( Apples are fruits, even when they are 'Manzanas' and 'Fruta', something that would be wholly lost in the 'one off' solution. To borrow from your analogy you need a "constitution" before "freedom of the press" or "womens suffrage" makes any sense, else every movment is extrodinary laborious, can't build on any other effort and is exclusive to a single problem for a single set of people. --michael _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
