So do people find Wikidata that impressive? 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.
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.
I find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, relation, object). It's being used to disambiguate concepts, named entities and support machine learning models with general knowledge in a standard format. There are plenty of papers on the topic of link prediction, auto-completion and triplet mining.
> I find it pretty well stuffed with appropriate information. You're looking at an ontology, not a wikipedia article, it's supposed to be dry (subject, relation, object).
We're talking about a research project with a large amount of funding to go from the former to the latter. But pretty much none of the stuff on Earth's Wikipedia page is represented here.
> applies to part: equator
An equator (the general concept to which the ontology links to) has no given orientation. Earth's Equator is a human construct distinct from an oblate spheroid's equator, as are the specific locations of the poles. Nowhere is it specified in the ontology that this is measured at a specific Equator, not just any equator.
This is all human context and understanding that we've built on top, and it's part of what I mean when I say that the data is kinda pointless. All of these facts depend on culture to understand.
I believe that in most modern human cultures the sentence "the diameter of the Earth" has a very imprecise, very informal, but very recognisable meaning. In fact, I really doubt that most people on the Earth would think of what precisely is the shape of the Earth when talking about its diameter.
Q2 is just an id, probably one shouldn't interpret too much into it except that it defines an entity. Regarding the diameter, probably it depends how you define it. For instance according to Wikipedia one can generalize it as sup { d(x,y) }, seems legitimate to me although Wikidata's referenced diameter definition (P2386) isn't that general, probably it should be updated... But to be fair, Earth (Q2) has the shape (P1419) oblate spheroid (Q3241540) under sourcing circumstances (P1480) approximation (Q27058) :-)
To me Wikidata (and similar projects like OSM) shine because they tend to have so many details.
I've worked with the Wikidata set a bit. On first glance the entries do seem to lack any useful information as it's all heavily abstracted into other items and properties - as well as containing a bunch of references and qualifiers to validate the facts.
Once you start connecting the items to other items and properties, you begin to see better information and context.
A lot of the "snaks" of items are units of measurement, so no worries converting them into other languages. This project should help in generating articles in other languages based on these facts.
I dont think its interesting in itself so much as in applications. I remember talking to someone once who was working on a project where you stick a probe in some soil, and then it uses wikidata to tell you the best type of plant to grow. I have no idea whatever happened to this project, if it worked or not - but it always struck me as a great example of the enabling value of wikidata - that you can use it to power ideas totally unrelated to the original purpose the data was collected for.
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.