Hacker News Reader

Comment by drej | Hacker News Reader

It's only shame that Wikidata doesn't get as much attention. It's a knowledge graph that runs _some_ of Wikipedia's content. I became involved recently and what I'd like to do is to get Wikipedians to use Wikidata more (e.g. automatically loading births and deaths on people's profiles), because once these two services are more interlinked, we're gonna get more knowledge graph info for free since people editing Wikipedia will keep improving this structured dataset.

I'd encourage people to get involved in either of these two projects - there's always a niche you know about and could improve its presence in the Wiki world.

View on HN

Is Wikidata how, for example, when a particular football team wins the Super Bowl, its articles are updated, the articles about the Super Bowl are updated, the article about the list of teams that have won multiple Super Bowls is updated, etc... all very quickly? Or is that just an army of volunteers.

There are two aspects of this:

1. If all superbowl-related articles used an extraction mechanism that links wikipedia with wikidata, then only the wikidata entry needs updating and all these articles get updated automatically. 2. That wikidata update I mentioned was manual, but a lot of data in Wikidata is updated automatically (e.g. births and deaths from some databases, city population counts etc.), so some things get updated across the board automatically. That's a source of pushback against this - articles being updated automatically, so bad actors can change a lot of things at once.

Surely having fewer points of information control makes auditing for suspicious/malicious edits easier than relying on auditing individual articles?

Here's what Wikidata says about Earth, an item that is number 2 in the ID list, and also on their front page as an example of incredible data.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2

I struggle to find anything interesting on this page. It is apparently a "topic of geography", whatever that means as a statement. It has a WordLift URL. It is an instance of an inner planet.

The first perhaps verifiable, solid fact, that Earth has a diameter of "12,742 kilometre", is immediately suspect. There is no clarifying remark, not even a note, that Earth is not any uniform shape and cannot have a single value as its diameter.

This is my problem with SPARQL, with "data bases", in that sense. Data alone is useless without a context or a framework in which it can be truly understood. Facts like this can have multiple values depending on exactly what you're measuring, or what you're using the measurement for.

And this on the page for Earth, an example that is used on their front page, and has the ID of 2. It is the second item to ever be created in Wikidata, after Q1, "Universe", and yet everything on it is useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com