[Feature idea] Adding wikidata, wikipedia & screenshot-url fields to package-recipes

[swedebugia]

Hi

I am a contributor to OSM and have seen how combining OSM and Wikidata/Wikipedia (WP) has been very useful.

I got the idea of adding Wikidata-entries to guix package objecs would be fruitful because:

It makes it possible to a more useful list of packages e.g. by showing links to WP entries for the program in the users local language. (E.g. by firing up a browser from emacs or the shell, or by populating a (per channel) html package list (with screenshots, local WP-links, etc.) and firing up a throw-away web-server instance serving this with e.g. guix package --list-available-packages-html)

It would also perhaps be of benefit to WP-contributors because we could easily make statistics for how many of the packages in guix a Wikidata-entry and/or WP-entry exists. Thus perhaps leading to creating of more articles for notable packages or improving WP-articles with outdated release information.

Implementation:

It could be implemented by adding the fields to package-objects.

The rationale for adding screenshot-url to the recipe is that this parsing of wikidata->en-WP->url-for-first-image for every package in our list is quite expensive. Better to do it once and perhaps update all the screenshot-urls once a year or so.

The rationale for adding WP (list of Wikipeidas with an article in the wikidata entry, e.g. ("en" "sv" "es") to the recipe is that this parsing of wikidata->WP for every package in our list is quite expensive. Better to do it once and perhaps update  once a year or so.

Also to help us to associate new and existing packages with wikidata-entries we could devise a guile-programmed way to associate wikidata-entries to existing package objects and perhaps use this to populate new package-recipes created with guix import

Guix would then be the first package manager to both be completely free of proprietary software and to leverage knowledge from Wikidata and WP.

What do you think?

Cheers
Swedebugia

PS: we could further improve our recipes by adding fields like "release date" either via guix import from upstream or by populating from WP. This would make it easy for WP-contributors to track when new releases happen and perhaps with a script automatically update WP-articles based on our recipes when we have newer information.

PPS: Perhaps over time it will even be feasible for WP to use our synopsis/descriptions somehow. This would enable us to integrate descriptions and translations for programs. E.g. a WP-contributor sees that an article in spanish for program x does not yet exist in es.WP but a translated synopsis and description already exists in Guix.