Hi Andy, You hit the nail on the head! I have been cataloguing the artists of the Netherlands since 2009 and have created tons of stubs on Wikipedia that now all need to become items on Wikidata. Most of them became items in the "Great Item-creation party" of the first few months after WD's birth, especially since a lot of them were already in the Hungarian Wikipedia that got converted first. It is a source of annoyance to me that I can't discover any way to automate the population of the English labels on Wikidata though, so I have been somewhat lazily filling these in as I bump into them.
I have decided that the easiest way to "pin" a painter bio in the Wikiverse that does not exist yet on the English Wikipedia, is to simply go ahead and create the stub on the English Wikipedia. This makes your 15 minutes of legwork into a half-hour of legwork, but it makes it much easier down the line to mesh in with WD, especially because searching WD for names of people who died more than 100 years ago brings its own international spelling challenges.
Though I totally agree with Lydia that in the ideal world you could create the item first on WD to use for stub-creation later, we are still a long way from that situation. I feel strongly that there could be a good case for an "article creation wizard" that runs off of WD, pre-populating things like info-boxes, categories, defaultsort, and lead sentence.
my 2c, Jane
2014-03-12 14:52 GMT+01:00, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
On 10 March 2014 23:28, Lydia Pintscher lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de wrote:
I'd love to know how you think that will happen, in a timely manner, for the kinds of people who use AfC,
Where do you see the biggest obstacles right now in the process? Maybe we can identify those and then see if we can find solutions for them? I'm not saying what you're seeing isn't a problem we need to fix. I just think we need to solve it in a better way. Let's find it.
The long answer to your question is for you to spend some time looking through, reviewing, and where appropriate publishing, the articles (especially biographies) submitted at AfC (on en.WP, though de.WP and others presumably have an equivalent?). The short asnwer is that we're talking about people who are using Wikipedia for the first time, and struggling, often requiring several iterations, to understand templates, referencing and other things which you and I take for granted.
Meanwhile, articles are being created, daily, via AfC with no Wikidata equivalent, or where someone has to create the equivalent manually, cutting-and-pasting or retyping text, rather than having tools do the work for them. That's crazy.
Sure. That is clearly not a great situation and we should see if we can improve it. What I'm saying is that we should not improve it by making people enter even more information in Wikipedia and then copy it over to Wikipedia
[ITYM "copy it over to Wikidata"]
I'm not sugegsting that we "make people enter even more information in Wikipedia"; I'm suggesting that wikidata would benefit from capturing the data that is /already/ being entered into Wikipedia, not least via AfC, by the people I describe above; and that I and others who review and publish those articles would benefit from tool to save us the manual task of having to retype (into Wikidata) what we're already asked to type once (into the AfC tool) as part of that process.
Let's identify the specific issues and see if we can find other solutions for them.
I'm pretty sure I already identified the specific issue here.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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