Re: [directory-discuss] Random thought on fsd and wikidata

[Marcin Cieslak]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2018, Laura Morales wrote:

> But do they help maintaining it? If not, they should be called on here since 
> they have a primary interest in keeping the directory updated.

Having had a look at the current state of the wiki maintaining FSD, I am not 
sure things are going well.
Current wiki uses a very complex systems of templates to coarse wiki into a 
structured data store.

What is the primary role of the FSD?

I'll give only two possible answers to highlight some important issues with the 
further development
of the directory:

1) To give casual desktop computing end-users an easy path to use free software 
for their needs?

This means answering questions like:

"I need a vector graphics editor for my personal machine, what is there 
available?"

2) To have a comprehensive machine-readable overview of all software available 
under the accepted
conditions.

"I need to know which AGPL-licensed modules are available for Ruby and not 
included in Debian".

In particular, I wonder how comprehensive FSD should be. Currently it does not 
cover thousands
of middleware modules available in various repositories like npm, pypi etc. 
Those repositories
provide machine-readable metadata that include license information. Also the 
there is a good
question how to treat places like Github or Fdroid.org that provide copious 
amount of
free software as well.

While it is possible to obtain those two goals at the same time, it might be 
difficult
to provide a very good information to the "end user". For example, someone 
looking
for "graphics" or "painting tool" should not be flooded with tens of thousands 
of results
coming from npm.

#1 and #2 can be different applications - #2 could be a comprehensive 
backend/aggregator,
#1 could be just a nice frontend that purposedfully limites the information 
available
for the sake of simplicity. Wikidata might be one of the technical solutions 
for the #2
backend application.

I am certain that the landscape has changed since the FSD have been created but 
I wasn't
around when it was created.

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