I agree with Monte Hurd and would add that my personal
volunteer time on
Wiki projects, though unique, is not irreplaceable, and the idea that I and
others interested in my area of editing could be "overworked" by some new
technology is just silly. I think you need to have a little faith in the
whole concept of crowd-sourcing. It really does seem to work. Automated
descriptions sounds like a terrible idea and I have seen time and again on
all sorts of subjects that the main claim to fame switches across
languages. An example is a language -pedia that has added a town because it
is the location of a castle that is notable in that language -pedia for
whatever reason, while in the language -pedia of the town itself, the town
may be better known as a hub on a railway network or some such thing.
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 8:08 PM, Monte Hurd <mhurd(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Responses inline...
On Mar 22, 2015, at 8:57 AM, Dmitry Brant
<dbrant(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
In preparation for next week's quarterly planning, I'd like to restate
some of my concerns regarding Wikidata descriptions and flesh them out more
comprehensively, since we're featuring them more prominently in the
upcoming quarter.
(n.b. These are more like "devil's
advocate" thoughts, lest I make it
sound like the Apps team isn't unified
in its vision, which it certainly
is.)
My reservations fall under two categories:
== Philosophical ==
Wikidata is a superbly valuable repository of *data* -- data that a
machine can
use to generate all kinds of results that us humans can
consume. The "description" field, on the other hand, is the only thing that
is *not* data, and is not usable by a machine in any way.
To allow users to manually fill in the Wikidata description (i.e. to
manually
duplicate the contents of Wikipedia) is to miss the point of the
true potential of Wikidata, which is to be able to *use* the data to
generate the description automatically!
I disagree with the premise that the description being "data" means it is
missing its promise if it is human curated. I am more concerned with the
quality of the description.
Of course the counterargument to this is that the
current state of
auto-generated descriptions is not quite good (they often sound
strange or
nonsensical), but that's only because the tools we have at our disposal for
generating descriptions are still in their infancy. I don't deny that this
will be a hard problem to solve, but in my view, this is ultimately the
*correct* problem to solve.
It's surprisingly hard to create auto generated descriptions that rival
the quality of user generated descriptions.
Deeply hard, in fact, because it's complicated not only by language
syntax and grammatical rules, but also by qualitative factors (readability,
meaning, context, relevance etc).
This already complicated situation then becomes many orders of magnitude
more difficult because these qualitative factors can differ between
languages.
The other thing (a more obvious one) that makes
Wikidata descriptions
redundant is the first sentence of every Wikipedia article
which, on its
own, is intended to provide a concise description of the article (and many
articles already do this with rather good consistency). In fact, as we
speak, we're working on programmatically "cleaning up" the first sentence
to make it even more concise. Why not simply use this as the description?
> Is the first sentence sometimes too
long to be a good description? No
problem: create a markup annotation that will denote the *portion* of the
first sentence that will serve as the description. In any case, making
users manually copy the content from the first sentence (which is from
where most of the current Wikidata descriptions appear to be derived) seems
extraordinarily unnecessary.
The description needs to be able to be shorter than the first sentence in
the article.
On top of all that, it creates an unnecessary
synchronization cost,
fulfillable only by a human contributor, between the two
sources of data.
> So, what I mean to say is: every edit
to the Wikidata description is a
missed opportunity to edit the Wikipedia article in such a way that the
description could be auto-generated correctly. (or, similarly, a missed
opportunity to edit the *data* of the Wikidata entry in such a way that the
description could be auto-generated correctly)
> == Practical ==
> If we open the floodgates to editing
the Wikidata description (i.e. if
we make it too easy to edit the description), I predict that we'll be very
disappointed by the quality of the contributions we'll get. I can see it
quickly devolving into a whole lot of noise, spam, and vandalism.
I predict this won't be any worse than what happened when we enabled
section editing.
This means that we would need to implement the
same kind of
moderation/administration schemes that currently exist on Wikipedia
itself. I'm by no means qualified to speak for the Community, but I doubt
that many Wikipedians will want to double their workload by having to
"watch" the Wikidata description of their favorite articles, in addition to
the articles themselves.
> I'll also point out that we do
not yet expose any administrative
mechanisms in the mobile apps. This means that users will routinely see
their edits disappear or be reverted without any notification or
explanation. This is already the case for the general editing of article
content in the apps, but since the description is featured much more
prominently, any edits (or reverts) to it will be much more noticeable, and
will surely add to the confusion and frustration.
I've been editing descriptions from the Wikidata site directly for months
and only one, of dozens I've added or edited were reverted.
If we really want to get it right, we have to
figure this out before
proceeding.
> -Dmitry
>
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