Magnus,

We are seeing more and more of these problematic merges. See: http://tinyurl.com/ovutz5x for the current list of (today 61) problems. Are these coming from the wikidata game?

All of the editors performing the merges seem to be new and the edit patterns seem to match the game. I thought the edits were tagged with a statement about them coming from the game, but I don't see that? If they are, could you just take genes and proteins out of the 'potential merge' queue ? I'm guessing that their frequently very similar names are putting many of them into the list.

We are starting to work on a bot to combat this, but would like to stop the main source of the damage if its possible to detect it. This is making Wikipedia integration more challenging than it already is...

thanks

-Ben

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com> wrote:

I fear my games may contribute to both problems (merging two items, and adding a sitelink to the wrong item). Both are facilitated by identical names/aliases, and sometimes it's hard to tell that a pair is meant to be different, especially if you don't know about the intricate structures of the respective knowledge domain.

An item-specific, but somewhat heavy-handed approach would be to prevent merging of any two items where at least one has P1889, no matter what it specifically points to. At least, give a warning that an item is "merge-protected", and require an additional override for the merge.

If that is acceptable, it would be easy for me to filter all items with P1889, from the merge game at least.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 8:50 PM Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/28/2015 12:08 PM, Tom Morris wrote:
[...]
> Going back to Ben's original problem, one tool that Freebase used to help
> manage the problem of incompatible type merges was a set of curated sets of
> incompatible types [5] which was used by the merge tools to warn users that
> the merge they were proposing probably wasn't a good idea. People could
> ignore the warning in the Freebase implementation, but Wikidata could make it
> a hard restriction or just a warning.
>
> Tom

I think that this idea is a good one. The incompatibility information could
be added to classes in the form of "this class is disjoint from that other
class". Tools would then be able to look for this information and produce
warnings or even have stronger reactions to proposed merging.

I'm not sure that using P1889 "different from" is going to be adequate. What
links would be needed? Just between a gene and its protein? That wouldn't
catch merging a gene and a related protein. Between all genes and all
proteins? It seems to me that this is better handled at the class level.

peter

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