This effort is super to see. As a Wikidata dilettante I was wondering if any thought has gone into what to do when data sources do not agree about a particular measurement. For example, consider the most basic example from the format [3]:
Population was __________ in ____
What if the World Bank says the population was 313.9 milion in 2012 but the US Census says it was 313,999,179 on July 19, 2012? Is there the ability to record the source of the data in Wikidata?
Population was __________ in ____ according to ______
Otherwise couldn’t the bots potentially stomp on each other? Or will some coordination happen where data from a particular source and bot will be privileged over others? How will that be documented? Or perhaps bots can watch for disagreements about a measurement (different value for the same property at the same time) and flag them for downstream processing by people? In a way, seeing how divergent these data sources are is interesting in itself.
I’m not trying to throw a wrench into the gears, I was just curious if there is an established Wikidata way to answer this question when it (inevitably) comes up. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that people disagreeing on Wikipedia is a substantially different situation than bots disagreeing on Wikidata. The bots will trample on each others work without a care, but people have the potential to discuss, negotiate and arrive at a solution. It seems like we might need to build some of this care into the data collection tools proposed for this project?
//Ed
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Economic_Map:_Format
On Jun 8, 2014, at 9:55 PM, Alex Peek alexpeek1@gmail.com wrote:
We are a new project looking for volunteers.
Project homepage: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Economic_Map
Thanks,
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