Hi all,
I'm not yet sure about the real purpose of the wikidata project.
Currently I feel a (or the?) main part is the data entry.
I welcome a reasonable and simplified approach. I guess, a
form based entry is the most obvious solution. But I'm not sure about the
appropriate Wiki syntax for the 'expert' mode where everything is open to
extended definitions. I feel the syntax should be closer to XML instead of
HTML commands, since XHTML2 becomes more and more stable. I guess that
there's not much help to implement a new syntax without upcoming standards
in mind.
However, I expect a rather different result from wikidata: I'd like to
access not only one fixed set of data, but I'd expect an overview of
multiple records, presented as a table.
I want to filter many records and limit the search to a subset.
I want to sort those records by one or multiple sort fields.
There are many more conclusions drawn from this expectation, such as
- search and replace operation on multiple records
- normalization of entries
- language conversion
- display variations (e.g. abbreviated, columns with markers
instead of field contents, html-table or preformatted text,
reordering of columns, subset of columns, transformation, ...)
- maybe one could even implement spreadsheet like field entry options
- custom sort orders
- search ranges (e.g. depending on field types)
- ...
But the main request here is: wikidata should be able to merge info from
multiple sources into one table overview.
I know about several projects which work this way on wikipedia. One of
them is to filter all wikipedia geo coordinates and put them into one
extracted format. I don't know about the operation after: Could I see this
extracted info in wikipedia/wikidata itself? Could I limit my view of the
full set of data (several thousand records) e.g. to a limited range (e.g.
an area within a certain range). Could I fix errors in this subset? And
would those modification be updated back to the original sources?
I guess, it COULD be done - in theory. I don't know yet whether this is
one of the goals of wikidata.
Thanks,
Martin