User:Daniel/Wikibase user survey

2023

Some questions we received as part of a survey by Wikimedia Germany of Wikibase users:

• Give a short description of your project, specifically mentioning why you chose to use Wikibase (max 100 words).
  • We are using a Wikibase instance at https://portal.mardi4nfdi.de/ to aggregate, integrate and curate research-related data across the field of mathematics. We chose this model because it allows us to
    1. customize our workflows and infrastructure for mathematical needs, while
    2. staying closely aligned with Wikidata and
    3. handling data that would not fit the scope of Wikidata (e.g. in terms of granularity).
• Describe how you documented your project (max 100 words).
  • Besides some basic on-wiki documentation, we keep our Wikibase-related code on GitHub at https://github.com/MaRDI4NFDI (particularly in the https://github.com/MaRDI4NFDI/portal-compose repo), and we wrote up an overview of our progress so far at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11484 .
• Did Wikibase meet your needs? Describe the challenges and successes you faced when implementing Wikibase (max 150 words).
  • Our project is ongoing, and we expect that we can adjust it to our most important needs. Some of the challenges that we encountered and that may be relevant to other Wikibase instances:
    • While most of the individual MediaWiki extensions, MediaWiki templates, Lua modules, gadgets, bot scripts, policy pages, namespaces etc. from Wikidata (or any other Wikibase, for that matter) can in principle be adapted in a rather straightforward fashion, the ecosystem as a whole that is composed of all these parts - or even just the major ones - is hard to adjust or even to recreate.
    • Some of the functionality that we need does not exist in Wikidata or any Wikibase. For instance, we want to be able to cite the results that a specific SPARQL query to our endpoint returned at a specific point in time.