Hi,
I participated remotely in the Wikidata Zurich Meetup - Wikidata BDay
session. And while not entirely related to Wikibase, I prepared for it by
writing answers to questions and I thought it might be interesting to some
people...
(I) How is Wikidata valuable / useful for you or your organization? If
possible, describe it with a concrete example
1. Wikidata is valuable as a model for how to organize properties on your
own Wikibase install, and finding ideas for how to use your data. It is
also useful as an easy to extract data from source to start building your
own Wikibase install.
(II) Please indicate 1 thing that you particularly like from Wikidata, and
1 thing that you don’t feel so comfortable with from Wikidata
2. Wikidata is a lot like old school library catalogs. Information is
near each other and can suggest alternative pathways or relationships that
can be worth exploring when writing academic papers.
One thing I do not like are generic nature of some properties which make it
hard to use domain specific knowledge in a way that is easily extractable
for queries or knowing what should be entered. An example is
classification. For Paralympic sports, this is the type of disability
classification used in competition, but it can also refer to classes of
submarines. For education, it can mean university or a non-educational
sports organization where someone got a scholarship to sponsor elite
sport. This can require huge domain subject knowledge to clean up.
Things I do not like are unsourced statements, which make it hard to judge
value of data as many numbers have a subjective value based on who created
them. For example, how many people died as a result of World War I.
Better to have multiple numbers with multiple sources than one source, even
if they disagree. Death toll from Hurrican Maria is another example where
multiple numbers is a good thing, even if there is source conflict.
what else can Wikidata do to keep / improve data quality
3. Quality can be improved by adding more references to statements, and
realizing that one statement on a property may not be enough. Encourage
people to source, especially when manually adding data. When doing bulk
data imports, make sure there is a quality aspect to it and seek out these
sources. Don't necessarily wait for people to offer data.
how do you think we can get more newcomers involved?
4. Get more newcomers involved by thinking more about data output.
Wikidata items are meant to be read by machines, not by humans. Humans
need human readable output. That output needs to be created in such a way
that it is useful. The query engine creates to many barriers to entry for
data use.
Also, realize that different users have different needs. Think about needs
of specific user groups and how to address the needs of that group.
Wikipedians, academics, edit-a-thon organizers and developers all have
different needs. By addressing those needs more specifically, you can
better reach these audiences.
Sincerely,
Laura Hale
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twitter: purplepopple