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by 9nGQluzmnq3M 2171 days ago
Most structured data in Wikipedia articles is in either infoboxes or tables, which can easily be represented as tabular data.

  Table country:

  Name,Capital,Population
  Aland,Foo,100
  Bland,Bar,200
Now you need a graph for representing connections between pages, but as long as the format is consistent (as they are in templates/infoboxes) that can be done with foreign keys.

  Table capital
  ID,Name
  123,Foo
  456,Bar

  Table country
  Name,Capital_id,Population
  Aland,123,100
  Bland,456,200
2 comments
mmarx 2171 days ago
> Most structured data in Wikipedia articles is in either infoboxes or tables

Most of the data in Wikidata does not end up in either Infoboxes or Tables in some Wikipedia, however, and, e.g., graph-like data such as family trees works quite poorly as a relational database; even if you don't consider qualifiers at all.

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zozbot234 2171 days ago
Those infoboxes get edited all the time to add new data, change data formats, etc. With a relational db, every single such edit would be a schema change. And you would have to somehow keep old schemas around for the wiki history. A triple-based format is a lot more general than that.
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