I can imagine somebody surfing the Web and wondering something like “How old is the oldest person still alive who is mentioned in the Wikipedia as having a birthday today?” It’s easy enough to look that up. In fact, you could do that right now.
But then you might want to ask “How old is the oldest person still alive born on any day of the year?” In fact, you might want to look for trends. Are there months of the year where those people are systematically older? Or perhaps days of the week?
It seems to me that there should be an easy way to ask those kinds of questions about data. I might be able to look it up manually, but that would quickly become tedious. And for many perfectly reasonable questions, it would be impossible.
I could write a computer program to mine the data fields of Wikipedia for the answers, but doing that requires a lot of specialized skills. Most people don’t have those skills, and are probably not all that motivated to attain them.
I wonder whether there would be a way to allow the general public to explore such questions about data, without being required to earn a degree in computer science. Maybe such a tool exists, and I just haven’t heard of it.
If you do know of such a thing, please let me know!