Never forget that even the full data, with all the qualifiers included, is, in most cases, little more information than what is contained in the lead paragraph of a complete wikipedia article.

Wikidata will be useful but it will never replace the encyclopedia articles and will, I believe, be most useful as a tool for finding those articles.

If current tools can only manage the basic datadump then that can be a starting point. Better tools will come because students have to do something to get those PhDs and this is going to be the data dump they can work on without having to wait years to get permission. :)

Joe

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi,
There is a huge difference between being complete and leaving out essential information. When you consider Ronald Reagan [1], it is essential information that he was a president of the USA and a governor of California. When you only make him an actor and a politician, the information you are left with gives the impression he is more relevant as an actor.

You brought attention to new functionality that is essentially broken. It does not give a fair impression of the Wikidata content. I have been arguing against overly referring to academic tools and standards. For me this announcement is yet another pointer that many of the tools are overrated and only have an "academic relevance.

Thanks,
GerardM

[1] http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=9960

On 13 June 2014 11:41, Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
Hi Gerard,

On 13/06/14 11:08, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Hoi,
When you leave out qualifiers, you will find that Ronald Reagan was
never president of the United States and only an actor. Yes, omitting
the statements with qualifiers is wrong but as a consequence the total
of the information is wrong as well.

I do not see the point of this functionality. It is wrong any way I look
at it. Without qualifiers information is wrong. Without statements
information is wrong and without the items involved the information is
incomplete and wrong.

As I see it you cannot win. Including this type of RDF export produces
something that I fail to see serves any purpose or it is the purpose
that you can.

Surely, Wikidata will never be complete. There will always be some statements missing. If we would follow your reasoning, the data would therefore never be of any use. I think this is a bit drastic.

Anyway, why argue? If you don't like the simplified exports, just use the full ones. We clearly say that "simplified" is not "faithful", and we have a detailed documentation about what is in each of the files. So it does not seem likely that people will be confused.

Best regards,

Markus

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