[OSM-talk] Please test this "Native wikipedia link" - feature

Tirkon tirkon33 at yahoo.de
Wed Jun 26 17:09:40 UTC 2013


Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at 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.




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