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