On 8 April 2013 09:20, Brad Jorsch <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Apr 8, 2013 12:11 AM, "Risker"
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I've indicated very early in this thread, Phase 2 affects an area of
English Wikipedia that is already under considerable dispute (i.e.,
infoboxes); requests for comment (RFCs) were already being drafted before
this deployment was being announced. There is a pretty good chance that
issues related to infoboxes will wind up being brought before the
Arbitration Committee within the next few months. English Wikipedia is
not
the place to test this software now. That's
what test wikis are for, and
what voluntary project participation is for.
Aren't the controversial issues along the lines of "who decides whether any
infobox should be used on an article" and possibly "which fields should an
infobox contain"? Both of those issues seem entirely unrelated to whether
or not the data for the fields that are present in the infobox may be
optionally fetched from wikidata.
On the surface, they appear unrelated.
I do not think it is particularly obvious outside of our project the way
that Wikidata is being "weaponized" as the reason for attempting to force
changes in local consensus about infoboxes (their existence and content)
with respect to specific article categories or even individual articles. I
am certain that such behaviours are contrary to the expectations of those
leading Wikidata; nonetheless, when I've drilled down on several of the
recent confrontations about infoboxes, at their core it has been about
making sure that there is an infobox in existence and in a format that will
be useable for Wikidata; it is not about "improving" the article or making
it more accessible to readers, or even about internal consistency.
Risker/Anne