Hoi,
Wikidata is very much a "working database". Its relevance is exactly
because of this. Without the connection to the interwiki links, it would
not be the same, it would not have the coverage and it would not have the
same sized community.
Considerations about secondary use are secondary. Yes, people may use it
for their own purposes and when it fits their needs, well and good. When it
does not, that is fine too. As it is, we do have all kind of Wiki "junk" in
there. We have disambiguation pages, list articles, templates, categories.
The challenge is to find a use for them.
When I add statements based on categories, I "document" many categories
[1]. As a result over 900 items for categories will show the result of a
query in the Reasonator. The results is what I think a category could
contain given the subject of a category. For Wikipedians they are articles
not categorised, red links and blue links.
There are several reasons why this is not (yet) a perfect fit. The most
obvious one is including articles that are not part of the selection eg a
list in a category full of humans. Currently not everything can be
expressed in a way that allows Reasonator to pick things up in a query..
dates come to mind. Then there are the categories that have an "arbitrary"
set of entries.
I am not going to speculate on what kind of qualifiers Commons will come up
with. In essence when you can sort it / select it Wikidata will do a better
job for you. The "only" thing we have to do is identify the items that fit
the mold. This is something that you can often find the basis for in
existing categories.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
Hi everybody,
Sorry to open up an old thread again after ten days, but there were some
things in Lydia's reply below that I wanted to come back to.
So, first, a couple of examples of the kind of Commons Categories I had in
mind:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_released_
by_British_Library_Images_Online
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Metropolitan_
Improvements_%281828%29_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd
Despite their names, both these cats effectively identify images from
particular photosets on Flickr. The first category relates to a particular
set of images released by a particular institution on a particular date.
The second relates to a particular set of scans from a particular edition
of a particular book. Both (IMO) would (and, moreover *should*) currently
fail Wikidata:Notability.
The book, and even the edition, might be notable. But a particular set of
scans surely would not. Similarly, the first category is really just a
photoset from Flickr, again something that wouldn't currently get a
Wikidata Q-number.
Now in the email below, Lydia effectively said: no problem, just give each
Commons Category a Wikidata Q-number anyway. ("Imho they should be on
Wikidata. I fear if we introduce another layer it'll be considerably harder
to use and maintain.")
GerardM, in sessions at Wikimania, also argued strongly simply for putting
everything in Wikidata.
But I think this would be a mistake, because IMO Wikidata:Notability is a
positive virtue, which should be defended. It is *useful* to people that
they can download a dump of Wikidata for their own purposes, and get
real-world relevant items, rather than the dump being bloated with wiki
junk.
So in my opinion, Commons categories should generally *not* get Q-numbers
on Wikidata (unless they pass WD:N), but should instead get items on the
Commons Wikibase which is being created expressly for the purpose of
holding structured data on things which really only have a commonswiki
significance, and are not real-world notable.
A second point relates to Magnus's issue about how much of this could be
replaced by queries.
Yes, if one were progressively building up a topic search on images from
books in the 1-million image BL Mechanical Curator release, one might ask
for books about London, then books published in a particular date range.
But within that, the natural query to specify scans from this particular
copy of 'Metropolitan Improvements' is the image's membership of this
particular set -- membership of the set in itself is something that should
be queryable, and such a query is the kind of query that, at the right
stage, should be offerable to the user trying to refine their search.
In fact, most current Commons categories will not be WD-notable. But even
for the most egregious of Commons intersection categories, IMO it will
still be worth the Commons Wikibase tracking category membership for an
image, not least for the ability that will give to easily present the
category's files in different ways -- eg perhaps sorted by filename; or by
original creation date; or by upload date; or by uploader; or by
geographical proximity... etc. Holding the category membership in the
wikibase then allows people to write gadgets to sort or filter or
re-present the category in multiple ways. So it's useful to have the
category as an entity that can be a target for a property.
But there are also reasons for a category to have an item in its own right
-- because there is structured data that one may wish to associate with the
category: one example would be access stats to members of the category (eg
which categories in the Mechanical Curator collection have had the most
file views?) -- the kind of thing of great interest to GLAMs.
Many categories also contain information defining them -- for example, for
the book scans category, one would want a property that this category
contained scans of the particular book (pointed to by its Q-number),
probably a particular edition (probably a qualifier). One might also want
to associate linked data -- pointers to entries for the book in (possibly
multiple) catalogues of its original host institution.
So for all these reasons it may well be useful, as a matter of course, to
have a container for structured information associated with each commonscat.
This is why I think each and every category on Commons should have its own
Commons Wikibase item, with an associated C-number.
Queries are important, but I'd suggest they are best seen as an *addition*
to the present category system, rather than a *replacement* for it.
A particular way forward, it seems to me, might be to allow categories to
be *augmented* with specific queries -- i.e. to allow rules to be specified
for particular categories, so that files whose structured-data topic
information matched the rules would automatically be added to the
categories, alongside the files already there.
Categories, including intersection categories, would therefore effectively
auto-update, without human intervention, to include new files if they had
appropriate topic information.
Existing legacy categorisation information would survive, allowing the new
augmentation approach to slowly come into play if topic information were
initially weak. And categories should still be specifiable by hand (or
automatically through templates, e.g. as source categories are often
specified through source templates) -- because this can still be the most
efficient way to specify naturally closed sets.
This would effectively allow a transition pathway towards categorisation /
sets-of-interest becoming more determined by the structured data.
One thing in particular it could allow would be a gadget to highlight
images that were in a category directly, *not* by virtue of any rule on any
metadata, which could then allow such images to be investigated and/or have
their topic metadata improved.
It's easy to mock the sometimes extraordinary depths of intersection
categories on Commons; such intersection categories are a pain to determine
for categorisation, not a very good fit for retrieval, and nor does it well
match how the rest of the world does things, which makes metadata import
harder and less effective than it should be.
But there are virtues in the category system too. There is a wealth of
hard-won information encoded in it. And some categories do match natural
groupings of images. The hand-curated category sets and hierarchies,
reflecting context knowledge, will often do better than even the best
AI-driven suggestions will ever be able to match for search refinement.
Such an approach as I've suggested above would combine categories and
topics in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way. Categories would
not all go away -- ever -- but would continue to exist side-by-side with
topics in a symbiotic way, that IMO would make the transition smoother and
more likely to engage and involve the existing community, to an end-point
that it seems to me would have additional strengths over a pure query
system.
I'm interested to know what other people think.
-- James. (User:Jheald)
On 19/08/2014 15:27, Lydia Pintscher wrote:
Hey :)
On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 4:22 PM, James Heald <j.heald(a)ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
Thanks Lydia!
Something that occurs to me is that one may well want to include Commons
categories in such a database, not just files, which presumably might be
stored on a page like
Info:Category:Insert random Commons category intersection here
so that one could then ask whether a file belongs to such a category or
not,
and the data would all be in the database.
So what you want is to be able to make the category one possible
search criteria when searching for images? We don't need an entity
type for that I think. We "just" have to build the search interface in
a way that it can take those into account as well from where they are
already now.
Or is that missing something important you had in mind?
Such categories (or sets) may well not be Wikidata notable, for example:
Category:Pictures I took on my cellphone one midsummer morning
so we cannot assume they have Q-numbers.
My assumption so far was that we can assume every topic we use to tag
images to be in Wikidata. Are there some examples currently in use on
Commons that you think would not be covered? Because Wikidata will be
used to tag much more than just Commons images in the future. So we
should have a really huge vocabulary.
But it would be nice if we could describe such properties using the
existing
Wikidata syntax, ie via a property Pxyz = "belongs to set", and then an
item
number for the set it belonged to.
What set is this for example? Like "everything takes as part of Wiki
Loves Monuments 2012"? Or some other kind of set?
Since the items wouldn't be on Wikidata, it would be useful if they had a
different namespace, eg C nnnnnn
Imho they should be on Wikidata. I fear if we introduce another layer
it'll be considerably harder to use and maintain.
Cheers
Lydia
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