The problem that users face is that they experience the merging of items to difficult or didn't know that that was possible. They understand (with much annoyance) that they can only add a sitelink to one item. Therefore they delete a sitelink on one item, and add it to another item.

Personally I think that an afterwards merge would be recommended here. Would it be possible to have a bot 1. determine what the original sitelink was that has been removed from the item, 2. see if this sitelink is added on another item, 3. check if the statements of both items match (otherwise: a list for humans/tool to check if it is the same), 4. if the same: automatically merge both items.

I think it would be good to have more things being automated as much as possible.

Romaine

2015-05-29 13:23 GMT+02:00 Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org>:
Hi all,

I just noticed that we have a number of "orphaned items" which were created and imported from some Wikipedia article that then got deleted. The result is an item with almost no data, no sitelinks, and all references claiming "imported from X Wikipedia".

Example:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9386774

Here is what happened:
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q9386774&action=history

It would be good to have a process for dealing with such cases. I am not saying that we must delete such items immediately, but it seems obvious that they need some special attention to become self-sustaining even without Wikipedia articles associated.

Things that would be important to keep such items:
* Links to other external datasets that confirm the existence of the thing.
* Links to authoritative web sites that confirm the existence of the thing.
* Proper references for all data (we always want that, but here it's even more critical: "imported from Wikipedia" is never great, but at least it leaves some hope of finding proper references if the Wikipedia page still exists).

In cases like the above, deletion seems to be the most reasonable solution (the little data that is there can easily be added again if needed in the future). It seems that one could automatically collect such candidates for deletion (pages that are not used as property values, have no site links, have no identifier properties, were not edited since more than a month, an have less than, say, ten properties+labels+descriptions).

Regards,

Markus

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