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@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@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



On 13 June 2014 11:41, Markus Krötzsch <markus@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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