Hoi,
Joe, plain vanilla Wikidata is not informative. It provides statements in
no particular order and it does it in a way where you have to scroll-a-lot
to see it all. It takes tools like Reasonator to organise the data so that
it becomes informative. With a little code it is possible to provide some
narrative about people. This works for English in the Reasonator, a good
example is JS Bach [1]. However this script works for any human, add info
and you may get a more informative text.
For most humans most Wikipedias do not have an article. As they are
considered notable and as there is information available, the available
information can be served. This is how we "share in the sum of available
knowledge". When you compare a Wikidata item with a Wikipedia article, you
will find that for most items there is no article and consequently Wikidata
has the edge in its ability to inform. Even for the English Wikipedia there
are many people who do not have an article.
I cannot wait for all those students to get cracking and deliver something
that is useful.
Markus, you indicate that you do not understand my arguments. You try to
refute my argument by referring to WDQ or Wikidata Query. Indeed, initially
it did not support qualifiers however the intention for the tool was to do
this eventually and, it always included all statements in a result. By
comparison the simple RDF export does not export statements with qualifiers
and there is no intention to change this in the future.
When you indicate that you disagree, I assume that you understand my
arguments.However you indicate you do not understand them so it is
appropriate to try and clarify my arguments.
[1]
http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q1339&lang=en
On 13 June 2014 12:56, Joe Filceolaire <filceolaire(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Never forget that even the full data, with all the
qualifiers included,
is, in most cases, little more information than what is contained in the
lead paragraph of a complete wikipedia article.
Wikidata will be useful but it will never replace the encyclopedia
articles and will, I believe, be most useful as a tool for finding those
articles.
If current tools can only manage the basic datadump then that can be a
starting point. Better tools will come because students have to do
something to get those PhDs and this is going to be the data dump they can
work on without having to wait years to get permission. :)
Joe
On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
There is a huge difference between being complete and leaving out
essential information. When you consider Ronald Reagan [1], it is essential
information that he was a president of the USA and a governor of
California. When you only make him an actor and a politician, the
information you are left with gives the impression he is more relevant as
an actor.
You brought attention to new functionality that is essentially broken. It
does not give a fair impression of the Wikidata content. I have been
arguing against overly referring to academic tools and standards. For me
this announcement is yet another pointer that many of the tools are
overrated and only have an "academic relevance.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=9960
On 13 June 2014 11:41, Markus Krötzsch <markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org>
wrote:
Hi Gerard,
On 13/06/14 11:08, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
When you leave out qualifiers, you will find that Ronald Reagan was
never president of the United States and only an actor. Yes, omitting
the statements with qualifiers is wrong but as a consequence the total
of the information is wrong as well.
I do not see the point of this functionality. It is wrong any way I look
at it. Without qualifiers information is wrong. Without statements
information is wrong and without the items involved the information is
incomplete and wrong.
As I see it you cannot win. Including this type of RDF export produces
something that I fail to see serves any purpose or it is the purpose
that you can.
Surely, Wikidata will never be complete. There will always be some
statements missing. If we would follow your reasoning, the data would
therefore never be of any use. I think this is a bit drastic.
Anyway, why argue? If you don't like the simplified exports, just use
the full ones. We clearly say that "simplified" is not "faithful",
and we
have a detailed documentation about what is in each of the files. So it
does not seem likely that people will be confused.
Best regards,
Markus
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