Arch Linux

kopiersperre

Member

Registered: 2011-03-22

Posts: 48

ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

Dear community,

do you know Wikidata?

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a common source of certain data types (for example, birth dates) which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia.

I think our PKGBUILDs would be a great source for the newest software version. Also pkgdesc, url, license and depends could be harvested. -> The Wikipedia infoboxes could be automatically filled from up-to-date PKGBUILD information.
Would you support this idea?

WorMzy

Forum Moderator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 11,846

Website

Re: ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

This doesn't sound like a good idea. What happens when the PKGBUILDs are full of bashisms? The .PKGINFO metadata files would be a better source, but these aren't easily available.

Besides, Arch's packages (particularly those in core) aren't always the newest available.

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drcouzelis

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2009-11-09

Posts: 4,092

Website

Re: ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

Is this in response to a particular problem with the Wikipedia?

kopiersperre

Member

Registered: 2011-03-22

Posts: 48

Re: ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

There is no problem with the Wikipedia.
The Arch package must be newer than wikipedia articles, because we have a vital interest in up-to-date packages.

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

I think our PKGBUILDs would be a great source for the newest software version. Also pkgdesc, url, license and depends could be harvested.

This would be, if not an explicit violation of Wikipedia's policies, then at least a violation of their spirit. That information needs a source citation, and citing a third-party build script from a distribution will always be less desirable/acceptable than citing the actual creators. The ease of automatically parsing text files is no excuse for sloppy encyclopedia editing. That's not to say that a wiki database of *nix software isn't a good idea, it's just that the structure and content of that database really shouldn't be determined by downstream distributions.

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kopiersperre

Member

Registered: 2011-03-22

Posts: 48

Re: ArchLinux as Information Source for Wikidata

There are Wikipedia's policies and there is Wikidata. I'm against sloppy bot articles, but Wikidata as a data repository is qualified for bot edits.

Wikidata Stats shows, that there most items have no individual reference. Only 12.68% have.