On improving Wikidata at scale

[James Hare]

Hello,

I came across your WikiLoop Coalition <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_WikiLoop/Coalition> and quickly took interest.

You probably already know me, but to reintroduce myself, I am James Hare <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Harej>, longtime Wikipedia and Wikidata editor and founder of Scatter <https://scatter.red>, a company which seeks to grow participation in the Wikidata ecosystem.

I am currently working on two projects that concern this. The first is a project to develop a highly available and reliable MediaWiki deployment on Kubernetes, such that anyone can launch a wiki with whatever features they want at the push of a button. The Credibility Coalition has funded part of this work as part of the Covid19Relay project <https://covid19relay.org> but there are other parts that still need to be funded. The second project is a standalone version of the Wikidata Query Service, to be used by bots and the like who can no longer use the primary WDQS because the queries time out. I have a (quite costly) prototype running on Amazon Neptune, but I need to make modifications to the updater, and am considering different backends as well.

These components are fundamental to scaling up contributions to Wikidata. For bots to update Wikidata they need to have up-to-date information on the state of Wikidata, which requires the ability to carry out queries without timeout. The Wikimedia Foundation does not offer this functionality to non-staff. The scalable MediaWiki on Kubernetes means that, at will, we can create and deploy Wikibases, either to prototype data models for future ingress into Wikidata, or to create standalone projects that complement Wikidata. Scaling up contribution to Wikidata requires the infrastructure to do it, and my company is making good progress on that front.

To take this further, I need funding. I am looking to raise $250,000. If you are able to help me with this, please contact me off-list.

In the meantime, I am happy to answer any questions you may have on-list.

Cheers,

James Hare

[María Cruz]

Hi James!!

Nice to see you over here =)

Thank you for sharing these projects with the list. I'll let others comment on the projects and ask questions, I just wanted to say thank you for reaching out to us with this information!

Cheers, 

María

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[Zainan Zhou (a.k.a Victor)]

Hi James,

Good to hear from you! It's a delight to hear that you are moving these meaningful technical projects forward. While as a coalition itself, the WikiLoop Coalition doesn't currently have any funding or grant to distribute, but we hope to build this group to a point where its members collectively can have more impact on recommending meaningful projects to resource decision makers. In the meantime, I welcome you to participate in our discussion, it happens bi-weekly on Wednesdays, and if you join the googlegroups.com you will get the regular calendar invitation. We will hold our next one next Wednesday.

+ElanHR: "highly available and reliable MediaWiki deployment on Kubernetes" might be relevant to the WikiFarm project we talk about.

+SJ: Covid19Relay project you might be interested

And I am personally very interested in "a standalone version of the Wikidata Query Service" could you send me the link to it?

Victor 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/wikiloop-coalition/CAPrkVrdouK1soO3TFuVpLNkosH8Ysx2T3MQYWQPGTimRfad6yA%40mail.gmail.com.

[James Hare]

Happy to participate in the WikiLoop Coalition in any case.

Elan, I would like to hear any ideas you may have for "WikiFarms." The ability to deploy farms of wikis on demand is a priority of mine.

Victor, I wish I could send you a link to the standalone query service, but I just took it down! But if you can describe your use case, I'd like to work with you and other users to bring it back up and support it in the long term.

[Zainan Zhou (a.k.a Victor)]

Great, don't worry about not having a live service for query service for now, but maybe in the future. I will wait for Elan's response.