On 19/10/2018 07:09, Pine W wrote:
> I would appreciate clarification what is proposed with regard to
> exposing problematic Wikidata ontology on Wikipedia. If the idea
> involves inserting poor-quality information onto English Wikipedia in
> order to spur us to fix problems with Wikidata, then I am likely to
> oppose it. English Wikipedia is not an endless resource for free labor,
> and we have too few skilled and good-faith volunteers to handle our
> already enormous scope of work.
You are right, and thankfully this is not what is proposed. The proposal
was to offer people who search for Commons media the (maybe optional)
possibility to find more results by letting the search engine traverse
the "more-general-than" links stored in Wikidata. People have discovered
cases where some of these links are not correct (surprise! it's a wiki
;-), and the suggestion was that such glitches would be fixed with
higher priority if there would be an application relying on it. But even
with some wrong links, the results a searcher would get would still
include mostly useful hits. Also, at least half of the currently
observed problems with this approach would lead to fewer results (e.g.,
dogs would be hard to include automatically to a search for all
mammals), but in such cases the proposed extension would simply do what
the baseline approach (ignoring the links) would do anyway, so service
would not get any worse. Also, the manual workarounds suggested by some
(adding "mammal" to all pictures of some "dog") would be compatible with
this, so one could do both to improve search experience on both ends.
Best regards,
Markus
Hi Markus, I seem to be missing something. Daniel said, "And I think the best way to achieve this is to start using the ontology as an ontology on wikimedia projects, and thus expose the fact that the ontology
is broken. This gives incentive to fix it, and examples as to what things should be possible using that ontology (namely, some level of basic inference)." I think that I understand the basic idea behind structured data on Commons. I also think that I understand your statement above. What I'm not understanding is how Daniel's proposal to "start using the ontology as an ontology on wikimedia projects, and thus expose the fact that the ontology
is broken." isn't a proposal to add poor quality information from Wikidata onto Wikipedia and, in the process, give Wikipedians more problems to fix. Can you or Daniel explain this?
Separately, someone wrote to me off list to make the point that Wikipedians who are active in non-English Wikipedias also wouldn't appreciate having their workloads increased by having a large quantity poor-quality information added to their edition of Wikipedia. I think that one of the person's concerns is that my statement could have been interpreted as implying something like "it's okay to insert poor-quality information on non-English Wikipedias because their standards are lower". I apologize if I gave the impression that I would approve of a non-English language edition of Wikipedia being on the receiving end of an unwelcome large addition of information that requires significant effort to clean up. Hopefully my response here will address the concerns that I heard off list, and if not then I welcome additional feedback.
Thanks,