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