Add Wikidata as discovery platform
Current problems
Proprietary competitors have ways to discover popular podcasts easily with one click and without having to know about RSS which puts free software like gnome podcast at a disadvantage. We also don't want to follow their centralized approach, because as a free software project we want to have a backend that is strongly community-based.
Goals & use cases
Having a discover page, that allows user to discover popular podcasts and follow them with one click. As a backend, I propose Wikidata (I have linked example queries we could use).
Requirements
- Power users can contribute data
- Casual users don't have to understand RSS
- Risks of gaming the ranks should be minimized
- Allows to filter by languages
Relevant art
I am no designer unfortunately, but I imagine for a v1 having a new tab at the top called discover, with a simple list of podcast, with a subscribe button for each item.
Proposal & plan
I have written a Wikidata query to explore how it would work.
I have found different quality indicators we could use to rank podcasts (click to see results):
Other ideas about possible indicators are welcome!
First one seems the most reliable with current data, but once podcast uses those datapoints, I think the community is going to help improve this data.
For a v2, we can use the data in more sophisticated ways, like having subsections:
- Award winning podcasts
- By genre (politics, storytelling, etc)
- By where they are from
- Podcast made by black persons for Black History Month
The possibilities are endless!
If maintainers think this is a good approach, I can propose a PR that implements this. Designer input would be deeply appreciated, but I can make the very simple v1 I talked about earlier on my own.