Wikimedia Commons Query Service ([[ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:SPARQL_query_service | WCQS ]]) is a SPARQL endpoint serving the [[ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data | Structured Data on Commons ]]. It is currently seeing very low level of traffic (between [[ https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000489/wikidata-query-service?orgId=1&refresh=1m&var-cluster_name=wcqs&var-graph_type=blazegraph&viewPanel=18 | 5 and 10 req/sec ]], most of them from monitoring tools). We suspect that authentication is one of the major reason for the lack of adoption (see T297995).
We need to figure out what the future of this service is. Operating a service that is mostly unused is not a good use of our resources. We should either fix it, or decommission it.
A few random notes:
* Removing authentication without putting in place either a robust backend or a robust way to rate limit is likely to create an unmaintainable service
* Data growth is ~1.5 Billion triples / year. This is likely to become a problem in the next 5 years on the current infrastructure.
* It is unclear what the use cases are for Structured Data on Commons. WCQS seems to be the main way to access that data (outside of dumps and browsing Commons). Different data consumption endpoints might be more useful than a SPARQL endpoint.
* The experience on WDQS shows that any attempt to scale the service (split, backend replacement) is prone to breaking changes which might cause a lot of frustration and additional work from data-reusers (query rewrite)
Please add thoughts and use cases below.