Ettore,
Wikidata has the ability of crowdsourcing...unfortunately, it is not effectively utilized.
Its because Wikidata does not yet provide a voting feature on statements...where as the vote gets higher...more resistance to change the statement is required.
But that breaks the notion of a "wiki" for some folks.
And there we circle back to Gerard's age old question of ... should Wikidata really be considered a wiki at all for the benefit of society ? or should it apply voting/resistance to keep it tidy, factual and less messy.
We have the technology to implement voting/resistance on statements. I personally would utilize that feature and many others probably would as well. Crowdsourcing the low voted facts back to applications like OpenRefine, or the recently sent out Survey vote mechanism for spam analysis on the low voted statements could highlight where things are untidy and implement vote casting to clean them up.
"...the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met..."
Hi,
The Wikidata's ontology is a mess, and I do not see how it could be otherwise. While the creation of new properties is controlled, any fool can decide that a
woman is no longer a human or is part of family. Maybe I'm a fool too? I wanted to remove the claim that a
ship is an instance of "ship type" because it produces weird circular inferences in my application; but maybe that makes sense to someone else.
There will never be a universal ontology on which everyone agrees. I wonder (sorry to think aloud) if Wikidata should not rather facilitate the use of external classifications. Many external ids are knowledge organization systems (ontologies, thesauri, classifications ...) I dream of a simple query that could search, in Wikidata, "all elements of the same class as 'poodle' according to the classification of
imagenet.