User:Kotniski/wdb

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? The following is an idea for the improvement of Wikipedia. After further work it may form the basis for a specific proposal or feature request. Please discuss this idea on the talk page.

Vague outline proposal - under construction

  • Set up a database (outside any particular wikimedia project, callable from any project, e.g. from English and other languages Wikipedias). Databse to be editable on WP principles.
  • Aim: each article subject ("entity") to have an entry in the database.
  • Each entry includes defined properties of the entity, depending on its type (e.g. date of birth, population, year of establishment, etc.), as well as properties which define its type (i.e. say what it is)
  • Database to be queryable via a user interface and programmatically from WP pages
  • Categorization to be automatic based on logic specified for particular types of entity - categories to be in fact (the results returned by) special cases of DB queries

Main uses:

  • sharing structured information between projects (in particular between different language versions of WP), for inclusion in article pages (e.g. in infoboxes; mainly via templates)
  • automatically generating lists, tables, statistics for use in articles or as separate pages
  • generating categories (or perhaps rather: performing the functions currently done by categories)

Could be implemented using Semantic MediaWiki!!