alt Hacker NewsIt's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't?
The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to make Apps/Websites
That said, it's also interesting that there hasn't been any big hit with people building new apps on top of Wikidata (I guess the website and Android app are technically different views on the same thing)
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Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.
> But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled.
A big part of that is that different language editions of wikipedia are very decoupled. One of the goals of wikidata was to share data between different language wikipedias. It needed to be decoupled so it was equal to all the different languages.
I’m not convinced that that’s an accurate view of Wikidata. Wikidata is a basically disconnected project. There is some connection, but it’s really very minimal and only for a small subset of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is 99% just text articles, not data combined together.
Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.
I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.