Qasim is a friend of mine. He is a software engineer, he has strong opinions about schemas, and his default position on any new tool is that it is an old tool wearing a new name.
He is usually right about that.
We had this conversation over chai. He asked what I'd been working on, I told him, and he spent the next twenty minutes taking it apart. The panels below are how it went.
Qasim asks a lot of questions. These are the real ones.
"So it's a database. Who's it for?"
Anyone who wants facts they can use rather than facts they have to read. A person reads an article. A program can't. Geo stores the second kind.
"Give me an example of the difference."
Wikipedia knows that a particular treaty was signed in a particular year, but it knows it as a sentence in a paragraph. To get it out, you parse the page and hope nobody rewords it. Here it's a value on a thing, with a type, and you ask for it.
"So what stops me putting complete nonsense in it?"
Nothing stops you proposing nonsense. Something stops it landing: a person has to approve it before it goes in.
"Who's the person?"
Someone who maintains that part of it. Different areas have different people.
"And who checks them?"
Everyone, afterwards. The proposal and the decision are both public and both stay. If something wrong gets waved through, it's wrong where anyone can look.
"That's not the same as being correct."
No, it isn't. It's the same as being checkable, which is a lower bar and a more honest one.
Simplifying is allowed. Overselling isn't. So, plainly:
It isn't automatic. People put things in and people check them. It's slow and manual, and that's the design rather than a missing feature.
It isn't always right. It's a record of what people have proposed and checked, not a machine that produces truth.
It isn't finished. Large parts of it are thin, wrong, or unexamined. That's what happens to anything built in public.
It isn't a search engine. You don't ask it questions in English. You ask it for specific things and it gives you specific things.
The test wasn't whether Qasim liked it. It was whether he could say back what it was.
He read the comic and said:
"Right, so it's Wikipedia for computers."
That isn't how anyone would put it on a website. But he had it, in one sentence, having previously had none of it.
That's what the comic was for.
Made for the "Explain Geo to someone who doesn't know" bounty. Audience: my friend Qasim, a software engineer who had never heard of it.