Can Wikipedia become a development platform in the future?

Content growth in Wikipedia is slowing down, and the number of active editors that are already small is also declining. Jimmy Wales has called on editors to review more and more content, this further hinders content growth. However, the reduction of new content in Wikipedia does not mean that it is dead. Wikipedia has a large structured database, which is an undiscovered treasure.

A large amount of data in Wikipedia comes from user creation, and more data can be analyzed by developers.

: Get edit history with wikidashboard browser extension

This rapidly growing user-contributed knowledge base may still be in its infancy. Ward cunnhan, the inventor of Wiki, believes Wales
The effort to review content is an inevitable and mature performance. Although neither of these two situations may seem to have liked it, it may not represent the direction of Wiki. However, Wikipedia
A large number of knowledge bases bring various value to developers.

Currently, no API is provided for Wikipedia. However, its data can be easily accessed and can be downloaded to a local machine for processing. Recently, a project called wikixmldb launched the XML-based Wikipedia, it is also worth mentioning that dbpedia converts data in Wikipedia into a structured database. People began to access the data in various ways and found some practical value. If Wikipedia can launch several official APIs, it will be as exciting as The New York Times launched API.

What can people do with Wikipedia data?

Using Wikipedia as an important knowledge source

Earlier, mainstream media talked about Wikipedia
Most of the time, they are interested in some of the participants. Those who have a long knee length and live in the wandering park in New Mexico like to post articles about astronomy or cooking. Wikipedia
Helping people release the knowledge that is buried in the brain and systematically discovering these people is just one of the many values built on Wikipedia.

The Palo Alto Research Center recently designed a program called wikidashboard, which analyzes the recent modification history of any Wikipedia article. Paul Irish was edited by a famous online music blog site. Recently, he designed a greasemonkey script to access the data directly on the Wikipedia page.

Use Wikipedia as a news Radar

Wikipedia is very concerned about current events. A website called wikirage is used to measure the importance of a topic based on the frequency of Wikipedia articles being modified. Rww has published such an article that data mining for non-advertising purposes will become prevalent in the future, and Facebook's emotional engine will become very large. Wikipedia is much less frequently edited than Twitter and Facebook, but may have a high value and will eventually be an important supplement to social media data mining.

Best case: balance the structure data of Wikipedia

Last month, an rww article mentioned that Google seems to have launched semantic structure data in some search results. Some of the data is analyzed by Google itself, and some are obviously from Wikipedia, these structured data will bring a lot of practical value.

The recommendation service website mspke is doing this. This commercial news tracking service uses Wikipedia to train its recommendation engine. 'Wikipedia's content clarification page helps them identify which of the two Michael Jordan's basketball stars and which is a statistician, 'said Sean ammirati of mspke. This information is useful in commercial recommendation services.

By analyzing a large number of Wikipedia words, mspke can quickly understand the articles they have found on the Internet. This is what metaweb and powerset have been doing. However, powerset has been acquired by Microsoft, and it is rumored that metaweb is not very promising.

Wikipedia can turn itself into an open database rather than a site for everyone to modify. It is also possible that Wikipedia is not popular enough to make such a leap, or its political disputes and enthusiastic recession have come too early. How can we simply let time prove everything.

International Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/could_wikipedias_future_api.php
Source: comshrap CMS official website