> When scraping HTML from Wikipedia, one is using general-purpose well-known tools. You'll get slightly better at whatever general-purpose programming language and libraries you were using, learn something that may be useful the next time you need to scrape something else. And most importantly, you know that you'll finish, you can see a path to success. When exploring something "alternative" like Wikidata, you aren't sure if it will work, so the alternative path needs to work harder to convince potential users of success.

I'm not sure its that clear. Scrapping is pretty generic, but SPARQL is hardly a proprietary query language - other things use it. If what you're into is obtaining data, sparql might more generically apply than scrapping would. It really depends on what you are doing in the future. At the very least if you do scrapping a lot, you're probably going to reinvent the parsing wheel a lot. To each their own.

> he's ignoring the work he invested in learning that query language (and where to query it), for instance

And Bill is ignoring the work of learning how to program. None of us start from nothing, and its not like any of this is trivial to learn if you've never touched a computer before.

And to be clear i'm not objecting - there is nothing wrong with using the skills you currently have to solve the problem you currently have. Whatever gets you the solution. If you're querying wikidata (or similar things) everyday, learning sparql is probably a good investment. If you're interested in sparql, then by all means learn it. But if those dont apply, then scrapping makes sense if you already know how to do that.