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

[Amirouche Boubekki]

Hello,

Like Pjotr I think it's a very good idea and the way forward.

Find below my comments with some modulation.

Le jeu. 1 nov. 2018 à 10:39, swedebugia <address@hidden> a écrit :
>
> 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:

The idea is to add a wikidata identifier for guix packages.

For those that are not familiar with wikidata here is a little summary
of my own.

wikidata is wikimedia project that put together structured data about the world.
wikidata is itself a wiki like wikipedia that anybody can improve it. The goal
of the project is to have a machine readable form of knowledge. One of the use
case for that, is to easily keep wikipedia (and other wik) up-to-date regarding
metadata. Simply said, one could generate, so called, info boxes on wikipedia
from wikidata.

See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q937466 for GNU mailman wikidata entity.

> 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)

The benefits for guix project:

Immediate benefit:

- It will be easier to translate description and synopsis
- Improve guix packages discover-ability via wikidata SPARQL endpoint
(e.g. give me all guix packages that deal with biology)
- Grab screenshot and other media or metadata about a given package

Other benefits:

- If upstream and other distro adopt wikidata as the Single Source Of
Truth, it will help with packaging and keeping guix up-to-date
- Everything is connected!

> 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 WP-articles with outdated release information.

This will be of great benefit for wikidata.

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

nitpick, those are records in guile scheme.

> 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.

I think the screenshot-url field will not be very helpful that can be
fetched based on wikidata identifier.

>
> 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.

Based on the wikidata entry, you can use SPARQL to retrieve the
wikipedia page in various language
and use wikipedia commons links to fetch screenshot.

Simply said, I think we should not add more fields than necessary to
build the package and push to wikidata
the information guix might need for other purposes than distribution and build.

The benefit of this approach is that package definition is not
overloaded with fields and non-code contributors
can still contribute to guix by submitting a screenshot to wikipedia
commons and editing wikidata.