Sven,
I see your point, since I also spent some time creating data items for
a while and then stopped. I disagree that this means that I lost
interest. I am still very interested, and I was also somewhat puzzled
by the new look. I disagree though that this release causes any more
confusion than the first one did. Of course every release will go
slower than projected, and of course it will have bugs and cause
confusion. I also see no problem with the English Wikipedia
implementation, because the consensus (as far as I understand it) is
that there will be no automatic edits to the English Wikipedia
resulting from Wikidata.

I think you need to see this as a second implementation of Wikimedia
Commons. That implementation had no automatic edits to the English
Wikipedia either, though bots were developed to ease this migration as
a way to seed Wikimedia Commons with images that could be used by more
than one language. I expect something similar to occur with Wikidata.

Not all local images on the English Wikipedia have been migrated to
Wikimedia Commons yet. Many of them never will be (these are the "fair
use images"), but many are just not seen enough or have too little
metadata to do this responsibly.

Jane

2013/2/8, Sven Manguard <svenmanguard@gmail.com>:

> Hello there. I have been an active and vocal supporter of Wikidata since
> almost the day it went live, and after giving Phase II a legitimate chance,
> I have to say that in my opinion the decision to deploy Phase II with only
> a small number of the expected features has been a massive mistake. Yes, I
> understand that the project was losing momentum and that several people
> commented that they felt that there was nothing to do on the project before
> Phase II hit, however the partial release has caused considerable

> confusion, and worse, has caused people to make decisions *based on what is
> available now* as opposed to based on *what would be the best choice in the
> long term*.

>
> It would have been one thing if Phase II were released with 80% of its
> projected features and an official list from the developers of the things
> that were left out. Instead we got what I have to guess is around 10% of
> the projected features, and if there's an official list of things that are
> missing or a timeline of when they're going to appear, I haven't seen it.
>
> I also have to question the timing of the release, bringing Phase II live
> just before Wikidata hits English Wikipedia. Was this done on purpose to
> try and bring over some of the Wikipedia editors? If not, the timing is
> awful. Nothing of this scale and level of technical sophistication ever
> gets deployed to English Wikipedia smoothly, and I think that the near
> future is going to show that the English Wikipedia deployment is going to
> be competing with the Phase II rollout for the time of the coders, who will
> need to fix bugs in both areas.
>
> I'm sorry for being so pessimistic, but I really do feel let down by this
> release. It's like being told that you're going to watch a feature film and
> then only getting the official trailer. The trailer is good, but it's not
> what people were expecting and it's not particularly valuable on its own.
>
> I look forward to any response that the Wikidata staff or the community
> might have to this.
>
> Sven
>

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