Wikidata

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2018–2023), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with Wikidata, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

The SPARQL query interface is unusable for the commenter2023-06-25
Hard to see what's missing or incorrect; queries often time out2022-01-18
Graph query language was too hard to work out from examples2021-10-03
Confusing and overly complex, so people struggle to use it and it is painful2021-09-03
Occasional editor can never figure out how to use it2021-08-24
Couldn't find the tutorial linked from Wikidata or its Wikipedia page2021-08-24
Stared at the interface unable to tell how to use it for anything2021-08-23
Contributing is painful; the RDF data model is clunky and slow to work with2021-08-23
Queries are inscrutable, documentation is poor, and queries time out before scanning needed data2021-08-23
Too many API queries needed and steep learning curve for SPARQL and RDF2021-08-23
Queries hit the 60-second time limit, making the service unworkable for the commenter's needs2021-08-20
Hard to get started with and easy to forget between infrequent uses2021-06-24
Search is hard to use, making datasets difficult to find2021-06-23
Must know exact metadata names, and autocomplete only helps with top-level attributes2021-05-23
API times out for anything mildly complicated, like a simple aggregation or sort2018-04-23