On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
It's not obvious within the project either, at least for someone like
me who hasn't been following the endless arguments over whether some
WikiProject should be able to decide not to use infoboxes on "their"
articles and whether they're ganging up to prevent any local consensus
to use infoboxes on "their" articles, etc, etc, etc.
Personally, I don't consider that people making spurious arguments
based on the existence of wikidata is a problem with the planned
wikidata phase 2 deployment.
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.
Is the conflict about wikidata, or is wikidata just another excuse for
one side to argue that infoboxes such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_classical_composer
should be deleted (or never created) and the other to argue that they
should be more widely used? Wikidata itself doesn't create a single
infobox or add an infobox to any article, and there is no requirement
for any infobox (or any instance of any particular infobox) to
actually use the data from wikidata.