User talk:Dsjoerg

Just some guy.

Hi everybody! I'm the founder of Data Collective, a startup non-profit that builds and supports technology to help people find, understand, and share data, advancing the knowledge and education of citizens everywhere. Sound familiar? We're very inspired by Wikipedia.

We're compiling datasets that should be of interest to everyone, for example today we compiled the U.S. Population annually from 1790 - 2011. As far as we can tell it didn't exist on the Internet anywhere before.

Continuing with that example, where does this data belong in Wikipedia? Should a chart of the data be put in certain articles? Should the data be linked to from certain articles? If I put those charts and links in myself, is that in violation of the conflict-of-interest or external-link policies?

Our goal is to help make Wikipedia more awesome by adding the data and charts that it ought to have.

To put it another way, consider this chart] that currently appears in Wikipedia. It doesn't indicate its source very precisely. All it says is "based on US Census data". Wouldn't it be better if the author provided a link where you could see the source data and how it was manipulated? But would the chart author's link be banned as spam since it links to the author's site? Or does the spam policy apply only to articles, and not to the metadata for an image?

What do you think?

Today I added an external link to the data from the US population page, and OhNoitsJamie ^Talk flagged it as spam:

Spamming your own website

Please do not add inappropriate external links to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a collection of links, nor should it be used for advertising or promotion. Inappropriate links include (but are not limited to) links to personal web sites, links to web sites with which you are affiliated, and links that attract visitors to a web site or promote a product. See the external links guideline and spam guideline for further explanations. Because Wikipedia uses the nofollow attribute value, its external links are disregarded by most search engines. If you feel the link should be added to the article, please discuss it on the article's talk page rather than re-adding it. Thank you. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 17:01, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Looking forward to talking with everyone & figuring out what should be done!

Don't spam Wikipedia with links to your site and you'll be fine. End-of-story. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 17:25, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Fair enough, Jamie. The larger question is, what's the best way to enhance Wikipedia's charts and data? I don't believe it'd be appropriate to post all the data underlying this chart directly into Wikipedia itself. However I believe an SVG of the chart itself would be useful in the article, and then of course Wikipedia readers deserve to have a link they can follow to get the underlying data, edit it, update the chart, and so on. So I'm trying to figure out what's the most Wikipedia-like way to achieve this. Dsjoerg (talk) 17:35, 2 December 2011 (UTC)