Gerard

Can you provide some URLs for these lists and blog postings please?

I think part of the problem may be that the information never reaches “ordinary editors”. Communication channels on our projects are very poor. I read article talk pages and the Australian Wikipedians Noticeboard, but not a lot of other places.

However, I have a problem and I wonder if Wikidata can help with it. We have a census in Australia every 5 years and the population data from the most recent census (2011) is a standard item in every lede and infobox for any Australian place (town/suburb/locality) article on en.WP at least. However, maintaining that information is a massive tedious manual task. As a consequence, we still have lots of articles with 2006 census data while the 2016 census is coming at us like a freight train. The 2016 census will be the first one done primarily online (normally we fill out a long paper form and so there are months of data entry which delays the release of the data) and the data will be released around mid-2017. Now all this population data is available as spreadsheets under CC-BY license.

My question is this. Can we update these spreadsheets into Wikidata and then create some kind of template on en.WP which can extract that data from Wikidata. I am thinking something like:

Which we could embed in, say, the lede and which would produce something like

In the 2016 Australian census, Childers reported a population of 12,345. <ref>….</ref>

Where the 12,345 (and probably some components of the citation) would be extracted from the 2016 spreadsheet entry for Childers. I’ve asked a few people if this is possible to automate in this way and I get the standard response “it might be but I don’t know enough about Wikidata”.

We have a similar problem with climate data where again we can probably obtain spreadsheets with the data under a suitable license if we had a way to automatically incorporate it into articles within the current massive manual effort.

Do you have any advice for us? I am sure we are not the only nation with this census problem, although I realise that in some countries the data may not be released in suitable formats or with suitable licenses.

Kerry

From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
Sent: Friday, 20 November 2015 5:18 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; WikiData-l <wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Quality issues

Hoi,

At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach.

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia quality because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.

There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality issue both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how to deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all.

I blogged about it..

Thanks,

GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.html