Thanks for your comments Ed. To answer your question, all Wikidata items created after someone else made a WIkipedia page (like the original Finnish Wikipedia article at the beginning of this thread) are by definition "stubs". Often (because of spelling differences in names) these should be merged and not fleshed out further. This stubby group of possible merge candidates happens precisely because the person making the item is not the same as the person making the article. One of the requests I have made before is to have a tool that generates a list of items linked to the Wikipedia pages I personally created. In my case, this would be the Wikipedia pages I created before 2014 or so, which I believe is more than a thousand. If I had a list of these with the number of statements in the items I would go through the ones with less than 5 statements and fix them. Since Wikidata I have flipped my way of work: instead of starting with images on Commons and then writing an article on Wikipedia, I now start with items on Wikidata and add images and articles much further down the road. 

On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 2:42 PM, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote:

> On Sep 2, 2017, at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Your note really made me feel so sad. I try to motivate my Wikipedian friends into doing more on Wikidata and each time they react the way you did, with a sentence like "I imagined that the mapping between Wikipedia and Wikidata was ultra-automated." I guess there is something about the "data" word in the same that makes people assume it is technical, or that being "machine-readable" makes it impossible for humans to read and without "bot" knowlege, there is no place for "normal contributors" to help out.

I appreciate this perspective a great deal. I think it's great that you are motivating users to edit Wikidata--it's really important. Wikidata is nothing (IMHO) without the human-in-the-loop.

But as a practical matter wouldn't it be useful if there were stubs in Wikidata that would help editors identify which entities need attention? Or would the vastness of it cause a problem?

I can certainly see an argument for an embargo period to give counter-vandalism efforts a chance to triage the new pages. But after that point wouldn't it be useful if a bot monitored the language wikipedias for new entries and then added them to Wikidata so that people could fill them out?

I'm just throwing ideas around here, and am not trying to be critical of the current state of affairs. You all are doing amazing work.

//Ed

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