On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 9:10 PM, Dmitry Brant dbrant@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Jane,
Perhaps my comments came off as more pessimistic than I intended. Of course I believe in the power of crowdsourcing, and I would never want to make anyone feel like their contributions are being marginalized.
I'll agree for now that the idea of "fully" automated descriptions leans more towards science fiction than reality. :)
However, my whole point has more to do with the apparent duplication of content that seems to be happening between the first sentence of Wikipedia articles and the corresponding Wikidata description. There's something about it that seems unnecessary. If we can figure out a way to automatically extract the description from the first sentence of the article, it would simplify things in two ways:
- People wouldn't need to edit Wikidata descriptions, and would instead
focus on improving the Wikipedia article. 2) People who monitor changes made to articles would need to monitor only the article, instead of the article plus its corresponding Wikidata description.
There are a lot more items on Wikidata than articles on Wikipedia. And not every language has a Wikipedia article for each item. Don't just look at descriptions on Wikidata as something useful for Wikipedia. They're much more than that.
Cheers Lydia