Hoi,

I am not championing Sparkle and other wonderful tools. I am adding data and i do no longer have the time. While I applaud your work it does not bring new data like the date of death into Wikidata. It works on the back of the work of the drones like me who add data. Your work while important is secondary and therefore your preferences are secondary.

The primary need is to bring quality information to Wikidata. Quality is not in sources but it is in knowing that there is agreement on the data and where there is not, only then sources become interesting at this stage or our game.

I will blog about the relative worth of sources in the near future. At this time I find it mostly a distraction because we are not working on comparison of data as long as it is not used to bring quality everwhere it does not do what I am looking for. It is concentrating on single facts and not on quality in the first place.

Thanks,

GerardM

On 4 June 2015 at 10:49, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:

Hi Gerard,

On 04.06.2015 09:26, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi,
An argument rages about the significance of the English WIkipedia using
Wikidata for person data, things like date of death.

I don't see an argument raging anywhere, though you seem to be raging quite a bit ;-) Maybe you have been discussing elsewhere than on the DBpedia or Wikidata mailing lists? (Are the Dutch Wikipedians discussing this maybe? If it's not in English, could you give us a summary of the issues discussed in this argument?)

>From my point of view, it would be great if DBpedia could donate some of its data to Wikidata. For example, there could be a bot that imports "date of death" statements from Wikipedia via DBpedia as you suggested. The Wikidata community has imported many statements from Wikipedia in the past and I don't see a big problem doing this with DBpedia in the middle if people feel that this is easier than extracting stuff from Wikipedia right away. I think the reason why it is not done is that nobody has prepared and proposed such a bot yet. If there is nobody from DBpedia who can help with this, maybe the best people to approach would be the bot authors who have helped to import all the existing personal data into Wikidata.

As I wrote in my previous email to the Wikidata list, I would prefer if Wikipedia-scraped data (whether from DBpedia or not) would go through the primary sources tool, to help Wikidata to get rid of all the "imported from Wikipedia" references. But this does not apply to DBpedia specifically in any way.

Anyway, let's not over-dramatise this discussion. If you want to champion this work, you could start by doing a simple query against the DBpedia and Wikidata SPARQL endpoints to count how many dates of death each of these datasets contains right now. The next step would be to use another simple query to display the most recent dates of death so as to compare them. This could give the community a sense of whether a large-scale bot action, a Wikidata game, primary sources, or a simple list of "editing suggestions" could be the right tool of getting the missing data into Wikidata.

Regards,

Markus

DBpedia does a better job than Wikidata does and it does it because they
not only use dumps to update their information but they also use
information from RSS. Therefore they do a better job than volunteers
like myself at Wikidata do.

In my blogpost [1] I argue for cooperation. My point is very much that
increasingly I find I do no longer have the time to maintain the data
for people who died in 2014 or 2015. I have done that the last two years..

I desperately want to do other things with Wikidata, things that are
more relevant. PLEASE consider cooperating with the DBpedia people. They
are part of our ecosystem, they want to share and they want to make
their data available with our license.
Thanks,
GerardM

[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/06/english-wikipedia-and-those-who-died-in.html

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata

--
Markus Kroetzsch
Faculty of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
http://korrekt.org/

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata