Re: Deployment of Wikidata

Personally, I think the focus of this discussion on infoboxes is 
short-sighted. My personal hope is that Wikidata will actually allow the 
Wikipedias to use fewer infoboxes (and when they are used, for them to 
be much smaller). This may sound counter-intuitive, but let me explain...

<opinionated rant>
Right now, English Wikipedia suffers from a continually growing plague 
of infobox cruft. Most articles on Wikipedia now look more like Pokemon 
cards than Encyclopedia articles. Compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
The problem with infoboxes is that they are inherently unencyclopedic. 
Infoboxes are for viewing data, not for giving a nuanced and 
comprehensive overview of a subject. In fact they actually detract from 
that goal. The infobox for George Washington leads me to believe that he 
had equal allegiance to Britain and the U.S., that he was a Deist 
Episcopal (which is quite misleading in its simplicity), and that his 
role as President of the United States was just as important as his role 
as Delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Virginia. Not to 
mention the fact that it's nearly 3 pages long! Imagine an infobox like 
that sitting in http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington.

If we had a repository where people could put all the fact-cruft that 
they want, they would probably be less tempted to spam the infoboxes 
with it. And maybe at some point we could even replace infoboxes with a 
"Data tab" or something similar that gave a full interface to the 
Wikidata data, but without having it dominate the Wikipedia article (as 
infoboxes do). I imagine that eventually the Wikidata content on many 
subjects will exceed the Wikipedia content.

So my personal hope is that Wikidata will eventually allow us to think 
outside the infobox. Heh, I think I'll make that my new slogan: "Think 
outside the infobox!" Or maybe "Death to infoboxes! Long live Wikidata!" :)
</opinionated rant>

Disclaimer: I'm not directly involved with the Wikidata project, just an 
interested onlooker.

Ryan Kaldari

On 7/10/12 6:01 PM, jmcclure <at> hypergrove.com wrote:
>   
>
> Hi Ryan,
> Normal wiki rules of the road are about who can edit what
> and when, not so much how, that I was referencing; I was responding to
> the concern about "control".
>
> You say: "Housing the infoboxes on
> WikiData would be a terrible idea for several reasons:
>
> * Every
> Wikipedia does infoboxes differently depending on the policies and
> conventions of that wiki (for example, on English Wikipedia we
> strongly
> discourage flag icons in infoboxes, while other wikis don't
> care).
>
> Reply: {{wikidata:en:infobox:Thomas Jefferson}} certainly can be
> different in content & style from {{wikidata:de:infobox:Thomas
> Jefferson}}, so the concern seems insubstantial to me. Noone is talking
> about universal "policies & conventions".
>
> * Infoboxes are only 1
> possible use of WikiData. Other possibilities:
> ** Setting the birth and
> death dates in the lead sentences of biographies
> ** Setting the
> coordinates displayed on geography articles
>
> Reply: You cite stable
> unchanging data. But should the community considers the ability to
> poll/re-poll/build/re-build constant data to be so important, then
> create a transcludable page on wikidata to hold that information. Do a
> {{subst:}} for that matter.
>
>   ** Populating the interlanguage links
> (already planned)
>
> Reply: Again, another (important) transcludable
> page.
>
> So, I humbly continue to ask: why impose triples-level
> client/server APIs on every wikipedia? What's being gained by such a
> design?
>
> Thanks in advance, John
>   
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