Am 28.09.2015 um 16:54 schrieb Thomas Douillard:
An example that just happened a few minutes ago : I did this kind of edits because the claims are wrong : https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q12191&diff=254099391&old... I think I already did this in the past. After a chat with Yamaha5, it appears he added this to complete a symmetric relations, which means if I just remove the claim in this item they are likely to come back. But it might be a chain of works : maybe a robot had imported this from some Wikipedia, then Yamaha completed the symmetric relation. If I remove the symmetric claims, the robot might reimport them, so ... with or without inferrences and magic, we will have to trace the origin of the problem to solve it once and for all.
Yes, bad info coming back via bots is a problem, but often it actually helps to surface some underlying issue with the data. It's not always easy to find or fix that underlying problem, but it's possible.
Making individual edits more powerful by adding internal automation (e.g. removing all "child" statements from a peseron's item would also "magically" remove the "parent" statement from the children's items) would not only make it easier to fix problems. It would also make mistakes harder to find mistakes, and it would give vandals a real boost in efficiency.
The Wiki Way is, in some ways, inefficient on purpose. Slow edit processes give people time for review. It's a bit like democracy in that regard... dictatorships are a lot more efficient than democracies, but does that make them better?...