On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Statements aren't, generally speaking, used in
other Wikimedia projects
hardly (such as in most Wikipedia infoxboxes) and thus aren't really visible
to most Wikimedia readers. It doesn't seem like there's much incentive to
improve verifiability of statements in Wikidata when they're not useful to
anybody except maybe Google's Knowledge Graph. :P
A much more useful visualization would be the proportion of statements and
other data from Wikidata actually referenced in places visible to users.
Wikidata is not a project that is useful by itself, even if it was 100%
perfectly verified by references. It only becomes useful through visibility
to information consumers.
I think everyone agrees that the next step for Wikidata is expansion
into greater use in Wikipedia. As far as I can tell, the biggest
reason this hasn't happened yet isn't community reluctance, but simply
lack of support for critical data types (especially numbers) that are
needed for mapping entire infoboxes against Wikidata items. Given that
those types are still missing, tracking the current usage would likely
not be hugely revelatory yet. That said, it'd be good for Wikidata to
provide a mechanism for tracking usage automatically -- there are some
manually maintained categories in different languages, but I doubt
they paint a complete picture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Templates_using_data_from_Wikidata
If an automatic tracking mechanism existed, I agree that this would be
one of the most valuable things to report as a key performance
indicator for the project as a whole. In the absence of automatic
tracking, an Erik Zachte style approach of parsing the dumps might at
least be used to generate some interim reports.
I don't, however, agree with parts of your characterization, as 1) the
growth of the Wikidata project itself does depend on metrics that
reflects its internal characteristics, 2) Wikidata's growth is useful
even if we don't yet see adoption at the level of templates, as it
leads to the development of applications like
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tempo_spatial_display.html ,
which with not a huge amount of effort could be turned into
Wikipedia-embeddable content (and are also independently useful).
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation