Project:About/Metabase vs Wikidata
Content aspects
Notability
The goal of Metabase is to collect information about the activities done and the resources produced by the international Wikimedia movement. This includes, for example:
- conferences and sessions in them
- educational materials
- edit-a-thons
- campaigns, competitions and other movement initiatives
- documents and reports produced by affiliates about their work
This list is not exhaustive. We welcome the community to think of other areas that could be covered to benefit the movement.
Metabase or Wikidata?
Some of the items in Metabase will have their equivalents in Wikidata, especially things that are not central to the Wikimedia movement but still needed to describe our work: geographical locations (the places where we hold our events), organizations (that we collaborate with), topics (that we talk about). Ideally, if something has a Wikiata equivalent, we prefer to have as little information about it in Metabase as possible, to avoid duplicating the work and having to update the data here when the Wikidata item changes. When people are concerned, there also issues of data privacy to think about. Refer to the modeling guide for more information about specific types of items.
Occasionally, we find Wikimedia movement items that have Wikidata equivalents. One example is the Wiki Loves competitions, like Wiki Loves Earth 2017 in Sweden ‒ contest (Q22548). Despite existing in Wikidata as well, they still have a full set of relevant information in Metabase, because they are central to the scope of this project.
Why not do this in Wikidata in the first place?
The raison d'être of Metabase is to provide a sandboxed, flexible infrastructure for experimenting with a subset of information.
Metabase allows us build up a database from scratch, where we can create our own ontology and notability criteria that fulfill our very specific needs. As much as we see the work of the Wikimedia movement as important and notable, many of the things in Metabase are not notable enough for Wikidata. From the point of view of Wikidata, Wikimedia Sverige (Q9) is just a small organization. Wikidata is not the right place to store data about all of its projects, employees and reports.
Technical aspects
While working on the Metabase project, we have encountered several major differences between Wikidata and a Wikibase Cloud instance. Experienced Wikidatans are used to features, such as gadgets and user scripts, that are not available in Wikibase Cloud. We list some of those differences below.
- Lack of property constraints
- We're using Template:Rules as a substitute. It's still not as effective or user-friendly as automatic constraint warnings.
- Lack of support for gadgets.
- Images from Wikimedia Commons are not shown.
- Lack of Extension:WikibaseCirrusSearch. This means it's not possible to run searches like haswbstatement:P180=Q146.
- The Cradle tool does not work correctly, searching for items in Wikidata instead (Phabricator)