Hi Pine,
As I understood Daniel, he did not talk about inserting low quality
content into any project, Wikipedia or other. What I believe he meant
with "using the ontology" is to use it for improving search/discovery
services that help editors to find something (i.e., technical
infrastructure, not editorial content). Doing so could lead to an
additional amount of mostly useful results, but it will not yet be
enough to get all results that a user would intuitively expect. Maybe
his wording made this sound a bit too dramatic -- I think he just wanted
to emphasize the point that any actual use will immediately provide
motivation and guidance for Wikidata editors to improve things that are
currently imperfect.
I agree with him in that I think we need to identify ways of moving
gradually forward, offering the small benefits we can already provide
while creating an environment that allows the community to improve
things step by step. If we ask for perfection before even starting, we
will get into a deadlock where we bind editor resources in redundant
tagging tasks instead of empowering the community to improve the
situation in a sustainable way.
Cheers,
Markus
On 20/10/2018 06:51, Pine W wrote:
On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 9:47 AM Markus Kroetzsch
<markus.kroetzsch(a)tu-dresden.de <mailto:markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de>>
wrote:
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,
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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