WikiBarCodes

This is a proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project.

WikiBarCodes
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Status of the proposal
Status	rejected
Reason	no support. Pecopteris (talk) 05:10, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
Details of the proposal
Project description	Provide a Wikipedia search service that includes all existing barcodes of goods and products. Each and every barcode is to be placed on a separate wiki page. Wikipedia users can insert amendments including information about ingredients (both healthy and dangerous), relevant researches, information on manufacturer, and other important data relative to goods and products. Such a database will improve Wikipedia and increase the value of the Wikipedia data.
Is it a multilingual wiki?	As many as possible One multilingual
Potential number of languages	As many as possible
Proposed tagline	The Encyclopedia of Barcodes
Proposed URL	http://wikibarcodes.org
Technical requirements
New features to require	-
Development wiki	-
Interested participants
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AlexandrKalaur

Related projects/proposals

None found.

Demos

[http://]

People interested

• The success of commercial apps like yuka show that there is a need for such project. An open source project is totally in-line with the spirit of this type of action. -- Thibdx (talk) 03:54, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

• Due to the nature of this project, I changed from "As many [language sites] as possible" into "One multilingual" site. --George Ho (talk) 17:01, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
• I am not sure if they all are notable. Usually books have bar codes matching ISBN but there already are sites like Goodreads and some specialised databases doing a good job in this. In case of goods, do you really think we need something like listing all the possible variations of lets say toilet papers, toilet brushes and so forth? In case there are some notable goods, like some notable sort of champagne for instance, I think that barcode information can be stored on Wikidata, so you'd better propose a new property there if there's none yet. --Base (talk) 18:09, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata stores code numbers of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Therefore, I guess Base is right; this proposal is redundant to Wikidata. --George Ho (talk) 20:02, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

• I assume the expectation is to be able to look up any bar code you might reasonably run into. I assume the "notability" criteria would be (approximately) any bar code in retail use. Acme rose-scented toilet paper and Acme lavender-scented toilet paper would (presumably) both have listings, if they have different bar codes.

I just tried Googling barcode database. It looks like there are already various places with free&open access to lookup of tens of millions of barcodes, with basic product information. So that basic mission appears to be redundant. The only "value add" I see here is the free-form wiki ability to start compiling arbitrary information about the products themselves. The fact that it's a "bar code" wiki becomes almost incidental - it's an "all retail products wiki" which happens to use bar codes as a convenient index. The more I think about it, the more uncomfortably commercial it all seems. And collecting generic information about products (such as healthy & dangerous ingredients) seems like it would get very awkward very fast.

I'll acknowledge that I'm working off of assumptions, guesses, and possibly mistaken conclusions. If there are aspects of the project that I am missing, or which I am getting badly wrong, then perhaps the project could be described better. Alsee (talk) 15:50, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

How would it get awkward? Username142857 (talk) 13:34, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

• There are a couple of questions I have about this proposal. In the proposal the following is written in the project description:

users can insert amendments including information about ingredients (both healthy and dangerous), relevant researches, information on manufacturer, and other important data relative to goods and products. Such a database will improve Wikipedia and increase the value of the Wikipedia data.

While inserting relevant research is definitely something that needs to be manual, I predict that the other goals (inserting information about ingredients, manufacturer and other data) will quickly become automated, with bots crawling through public data and moving the data to WBC. Like Alsee said, there are already websites for this purpose, and while that shouldn't preclude a Wikimedia project per se, I think the raw-data nature of barcodes will essentially lead to a duplicate of other databases.

My second question is why something similar to this couldn't be handled through Wikidata (whose logo, conveniently, is a barcode 😉). They already have various ID-number attributes for database items. InsaneHacker (talk) 23:16, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

• How would this wiki combat duplicates? Or is every barcode unique? --Donald Trung (Talk 🤳🏻) (My global lock 😒🌏🔒) (My global unlock 😄🌏🔓) 12:00, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
• I see no reason to start such a project separately from Wikidata. Wikidata has Global Trade Item Number (P3962) to store barcode information. ChristianKl (talk) 12:31, 30 November 2017 (UTC)