Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Wikidata has failed. This is not their fault, we have know for 10+ years machine readable data fails. See tags, and their failure (hashtag != tag)

Their example of a goat, a simple common animal, does not identify how many teats a goat has ( does it? )

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2934

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat

Everyone starting does family trees. Because they are easy and easily defined. But even this articles query ends up at fictional characters.

The "period of lactation" for a goat is not a number. And it's not even one graph. It's multiple graphs which we don't have the data to accurately know.

The original article was 100% correct. Web-scraping was the way to get the data. Web-scraping is a very useful and transferable skill. There's no point learning skills on a known failed idea like machine readable data.

Wikipedia allows web scraping, anyone who tells you different is lying, see their robots.txt to make sure you don't get rate limited if doing massive amounts https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt (and to see the stuff they don't want you to read). They also have downloadable dumps you can use.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: