I'm thinking about this in relation to importing external data sets and possibly automating keeping the data up to date within Wikidata. To use a practical example the Office for National Statistics https://www.ons.gov.uk/ in the UK produces many of the official datasets about the UK including population, income levels, consumer price index, unemployment rate, etc, there are equivalent organisations in many countries. The ONS produces a new large data set every week, much of which (at least the headline figures) would be very useful to have on Wikidata. It seems unrealistic to keep all this data up to date by hand given the amount of data, the size of the community and the different skill levels and interests within it.
If someone (either within Wikidata or ONS) set up a bot or other system to keep these figures up to date it seems sensible to have some sort of system in place so that if someone wanted to change/merge or delete an item or set of items that were fed by this external data set (either manually or using a bot) that they were at least aware that doing so would break a link keeping the values up to date.
John
On 10 June 2016 at 12:53, Sandra Fauconnier sandra.fauconnier@gmail.com wrote:
On 10 Jun 2016, at 12:39, Yellowcard yellowcard@wikipedia.de wrote:
However, there are single statements (!) that are proven to be correct (possibly in connection with qualifiers) and are no subject to being changed in future. Locking these statements would make them much less risky to obtain them and use them directly in Wikipedia. What would be the disadvantage of this, given that slightly experienced users can still edit them and the lock is only a protection against anonymous vandalism?
I agree 100%, and would like to add (again) that this would also make our data more reliable for re-use outside Wikimedia projects.
There’s a huge scala of possibilities between locking harshly (no-one can edit it anymore) and leaving stuff entirely open. I disagree that just one tiny step away from ‘entirely open’ betrays the wiki principle.
Of course I’m in favour of all improvements to watchlist systematics. However, with 100,000+ items I’ll probably be watching at some point, even great tools might not be enough to catch everything. And I’d indeed like to focus all my time on constructive new edits, and advocating the great work we do ;-)
Sandra _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata