Wikidata has received an amazing amount of attention, even before a single line of code was written. This is very encouraging, but it also leads to extremely high expectations. Wikidata is a lot of things to a lot of people. It is based on ideas, proposals and technology that have been developed for almost a decade within the Wikimedia movement, and even much longer before. It is obvious that, while Wikidata moves forward and while decisions are being made, we will not meet all these expectations.
This short note aims to collect some fundamental requirements for Wikidata, in order to ensure that the discussion and the collection of ideas by the community has good base in order to be effective.
Ово су обавезни услови:
- Wikidata will be a Wikimedia project, eventually maintained and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. This mandates that Wikidata will follow the principles and guidelines of the Wikimedia movement.
- Софтвер који покреће Википодатаке биће развијен под слободном лиценцом и ослањаће се искључиво на слободан софтвер.
- The setup for Wikidata should blend into the current Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure as easily as possible. This means that we should fit into the same dumping, backup, and operations infrastructure as far as possible. This mandates that we use MediaWiki, PHP, MySQL, etc.
- Садржај Википодатака ће бити доступан под слободном лиценцом.
- Садржај Википодатак моћиће да се извози у слободним форматима датотека.
- Успех Википодатака се немери по количини података које складишти, већ по стварању здраве заједнице и корисности за Википедију и друге апликације.
- Wikidata will not be about the truth, but about statements and their references. These can be contradictory.
- Википодатци ће бити преведени на све језике који постоје на Википедији.
- The expressiveness of Wikidata will be limited. There will always be examples of knowledge that Wikidata will not be able to convey. We hope that this expressiveness can increase over time.
- Програми Википодатака не одлучују о садржају Википодатака као што и програмери МедијаВикија не одлучују о садржају Википедије. Они такоће могу да додају податке на Википодатке али не добијају никаква посебна права у оквиру заједнице.
The following requirements are used as strong guidances that we apply in the design of Wikidata:
- Wikidata is a socio-technical system. Instead of trying to be overly intelligent, we rely on the Wikimedia communities.
- The first goal of Wikidata is to serve actual use cases in Wikipedia, not to enable some form of hypothetical perfection in knowledge representation.
- Wikidata has to balance ease of use and expressiveness of statements. The user interface should not get complicated to merely cover a few exceptional edge cases.
- What is an exceptional case, and what is not, will be defined by how often they appear in Wikipedia. Instead of anecdotal evidence or hypothetical examples we will analyse Wikipedia and see how frequent specific cases are.
- Будимо прагматични. Завршено је боље него савршено.
- Wikidata will provide a lot of data that can support research. We want to ensure that it is easily usable.
- Wikidata will provide an API interface to create alternative UIs which are more intelligent than the standard Wikidata one.
- Wikidata will be editable by humans and by bots alike. But the people running the bots must be aware of their heightened responsibility to not overwhelm the community.