Hi all,
Looking at more "orphaned items", I found several pairs of items that look like these two:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17574663 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17569687
Same label and description, same coordinates, no Wikidata articles, "identified" by different Historic Scotland IDs. If you follow the ID links, however, you can see that the first of the items has data that does not match the ID, while the second is correct.
The direct question is: How to fix these errors? There are other cases, such as Q17572335 and Q17570206. I did not do a systematic study, but something seems to have gone wrong here in more than one case. I cannot fix mass edits one by one without having a clue what has happened and why.
The indirect question is: How can I find out who did this and maybe ask the person to fix it? The history is of no help (Reinheitsgebot/Widar). Posting every error in Wikidata to this list to ask also seems like a bad idea.
Finally, the technical question is: Why is this even possible? I thought that, in each language, label+description are a key (globally unique), yet here we have many pairs of items with exactly the same label and description. Or is the problem that no description was entered and so the system does not apply the key? In any case, a data integration helper application that looks at equal labels+descriptions would probably make sense, especially for orphaned items. (As I know Wikidata, someone might well reply to this email with a link to where this is already found ;-).
Regards
Markus