Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote: >isn't wikidata an extract of Wikipedia and therefor doesn't provide more but >at the most the same information than Wikipedia? What can you do with your >approach that you can't do with the inter language links in WP? (ok, in >wikidata you get the semantics about an object, while WP provides you an >article that might also cover multiple objects, but IMHO the semantics about >what is an object should remain in OSM).
Theoretically you are right. If you want to find a Wikipedia article in another language it works. But as soon as you want to use the interlanguage links as a database - just like OSM - then it is suboptimal. Wikipedia needs the unique links because the interlanguage links are only the beginning and the fundament of other Wikidata features. In future i.e. all the standard data of persons or towns in the infobox (i.e area, elevation, population) will be taken from the central Wikidata for all languages as well, possibly imported from official sources, if they are free. Therefore you need a unique structure. At present all the changing data (i.e. population) have to be edited in every language by hand. Further the Wikidata object is easier to handle. There is no need to scan all links in order to find one of them. If you walked before Wikidata along a chain of languages you did not always come back to the beginning. Before Wikidata you had often two or three scattered blocks of languages that should have been one block and one Wikidata object. Since Wikidata many of them could be found. Concerning the "Native language" feature nobody was able to provide it in a live-situation before Wikidata. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk