Hi Joe,
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Joe Filceolaire <filceolaire(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Congratulations Lydia. I think you will do a great job
with this.
Thank you!
On your three areas we need to focus on I have some
comments:
1. Building trust in our data. The project is
still young and the
Wikipedia editors and others are still wary of using data from
Wikidata on a large scale. We need to build tools and processes to
make our data more trustworthy.
2. Improving the user experience around Wikidata. Building Wikidata to
the point where it is today was a tremendous technical task that we
achieved in a rather short time. This though meant that in places the
user experience has not gotten as much attention. We need to make the
experience of using Wikidata smoother.
3. Making Wikidata easier to understand. Wikidata is a very geeky and
technical project. However to be truly successful it will need to be
easy to get the ideas behind it.
1. I think that if we have to wait till wikipedians trust our data before
they use it then we may never get there. Rather we need to make it easier
for wikipedians to edit our data than it is for them to edit a local infobox
so that wikipedians themselves can improve our data.
Yes I don't propose waiting until Wikipedians (and others) trust the
data in Wikidata. My point is that from the development side we need
to focus on providing tools and fixing existing ones to make it easy
for the editor community to create and maintain a high-quality
database. This means for example making the revision history of an
item actually readable for human beings. (Case in point:
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q24&action=history)ory). There
are quite a few of those things that we need to fix and if you stumble
upon them please let me know so I can add them to my list. On the
editor community side this means for me to push initiatives that
increase the number of sourced statements for example.
2. This means the emphasis is on improving the user
experience around the
wikipedia interface to wikidata. When that is smooth enough then no one will
care that the edit interface on wikidata itself is a bit geeky.
Both needs to happen. Wikidata can't be a place that only geeks can
understand. While Wikipedia is obviously the use-case that comes first
in all decisions there are other users who are going to make use of
the data in Wikidata - potentially much more than Wikipedia.
3. If most people interact with wikidata via infoboxes
on wikipedia and
Vcards on wikivoyage then wikidata becomes much easier to understand - at
least the bit of wikidata they interact with. Then users, for the most part,
don't need to 'get' the ideas behind the infobox.
They will still need to understand that there is a central repository
that they are accessing for example and that their edit is going to
affect a lot of other places potentially.
From this the priorities, as I see them, are:
A. Finish the remaining datatypes.
Obviously numbers is a high priority (lacking a UI still but hopefully
we can roll this out soon). The other ones a bit less at this point.
B. Develop and test model infoboxes on wikidata ready
for wikiprojects in
any language to adopt and deploy. (To test these infoboxes we will need to
be able to enable wikidata as a wikibase client with a sitelink from every
item to its talk page so infoboxes on the talk page work like infoboxes on
any other sitelinked page.) Tweak the ontology as necessary to make the
infoboxes work.
I don't think building them on Wikidata itself will work. Each
Wikipedia has too much of their own ideas of what their infoboxes
should look like and how they should behave. What I can imagine and
what is relatively easy to do is a page on Wikidata with links to
particularly good Wikidata-based infoboxes on various Wikipedias so
people can check them there and get ideas. In fact I think this would
be great to have.
C. Adapt the wikipedia infobox visual editor so it can
edit as 2. above.
Deploy the revised visual editor on wikidata first so we can test it before
it goes live elsewhere.
Tighter integration with VisualEditor obviously needs to happen. But
there is much discussion still to be had about how exactly for example
with the VisualEditor team. That's on my list.
This is just my opinion but I offer it as a
conversation starter. Is my list
very different from yours?
They differ but I don't think too much. Hope that gave some insight.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Obentrautstr. 72
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
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