Thursday, August 22, 2013

#DBpedia and #Wikidata revisited

Many people add "statements" to Wikidata. One obvious resource is Wikipedia because they are already intimately linked through the interwikilinks. Another fine reason is because with statements in Wikidata the same infobox can be served in many more Wikipedias.

Sadly it is to a large extend a waste of time. DBpedia has already extracted a huge amount of data. When the data flows into Wikidata in effect it will flow back into Wikipedia. There are two possible objections:
  • maybe some people prefer to do it by hand
  • DBpedia is license under the CC-by-sa and Wikidata uses CC-0
The people who prefer to everything yet again I prefer to go elsewhere. What folly; our aim is to provide information not to keep them occupied.

The license issue is in my opinion a non issue as well. All it takes to make a DBpedia under a new license is run the process of extraction again with the intention to license it under the CC-0. If you think this is a bit too much, I agree so lets agree to make the data available for use in Wikidata. Motivation: DBpedia wants to give back to Wikipedia and, this is the way to do it.

When statements are added from DBpedia with the specific Wikipedia as the source, the people who want to be occupied can have a field day comparing and curating the data. If they want to look really smart, they can add the sources in Wikidata known in Wikipedia.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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