The Next Big Step For Wikidata: Forming a Hub For Researchers

The ed17 writes Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. ... This proposal is significant because no other open collaborative project ... can connect the free databases in the world across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. ...the project will be capable of providing a unique open service: for the first time, that will allow both citizens and professional scientists from any research or language community to integrate their databases into an open global structure, to publicly annotate, verify, criticize and improve the quality of available data, to define its limits, to contribute to the evolution of its ontology, and to make all this available to everyone, without any restrictions on use and reuse.

Comments

Give it a chance

[Okian Warrior]

I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea...

When I first heard about wikipedia and the theory driving it I thought it was a terribly bad idea at the time... but ya know, I find it really useful. It's got lots of problems but on balance it's s lot more useful than problematic.

We've identified many deep problems with scientific research on this very forum, and to my knowledge little progress has been made over the last decade.

Can't we at least *try* different solutions?

Where is it written(*) that the old ways are the best?

(*) The script to Skyfall of course. I got that from Wikiquotes.

Re:Editable scientific data?

[ranton]

I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea... It would rip the guts right out of repeatability, and confidence that "this" is what $RESEARCHER found.

Um, have you never heard of versioning? It would be pretty trivial to add the statement "Used the XXX v3.5.1 dataset to perform these calculations" to your research paper.