I think this is clearly an evolutionary process.  In the short term, wikidata needs to support Wikipedia use cases as Andrew mentioned above (thank you for the clarification).  In the long term, this function and all other functions will (in my opinion) best be served by a transition into more and more of an entity graph where claims are made about things in the world rather than about constructs in a database.  Perhaps there is some form of the WikiData game that could be generated to support this process for lists.

The intervening period is going to be a challenge in terms of modeling and in application-level hiding of weird ontological situations where objects are being described like (item1: instanceOf, WikipediaList AND item1: subclassOf moons of jupiter), but there is no way around it.  And its 100% worthwhile to do whatever it takes to keep things integrated with Wikipedia and to further establish wikidata as indispensable there. 

-Ben

 




On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
In General,

I think Wikidata needs to decide going forward if it will be a strict Entity Graph...or if it will be a Big Graph of all things Wikipedia.
Its an important question...if it decides on the latter...then just give a way to filter out non-entities for the API and Search users.



On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:
Benjamin has the right idea... and we did similar in Freebase in handling that same way... sometimes it was a manual labor of love... most of the time, we just deleted them and hoped that Wikipedia would make them real topic entities later on for us to properly absorb.

How Wikidata decided to handle, I don't care...if you keep them around, then just give users a way to filter them out in your API's is all that I ask. :)



On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Benjamin Good <ben.mcgee.good@gmail.com> wrote:
This is an important question.  There are apparently 196,839 known list items based on a query for instanceOf Wikipedia list item (CLAIM[31:13406463])

I tend to agree with Thad that these kinds of items aren't really what we want filling in WikiData.  In fact replacing them with the ability to generate them automatically based on queries is a primary use case for wikidata.  But just deleting them doesn't entirely make sense either because they are key signposts into things that ought to be brought into wikidata properly.  The items in these lists clearly matter..

Ideally we could generate a bot that would examine each of these lists and identify the unifying properties that should be added to the items within the list that would enable the list to be reproduced by a query.  

I disagree that this reasoning suggests deleting items about categories and disambiguation pages. - both of these clearly have functions in wikidata.  I'm not sure what the function of a list entity is.  


On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
By this reasoning we should also delete items about categories or disambiguation pages.

Thad Guidry, 15/06/2015 17:21:
Ex. List of tallest buildings in Wuhan -
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6642364

 What's the issue here? The item doesn't actually contain any list, there is no duplication or information "clumped together".

Nemo


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