On Sat, Oct 20, 2018 at 4:41 PM Daniel Kinzler dkinzler@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Pine, sorry for the misleading wording. Let me clarify below.
Am 19.10.18 um 9:51 nachm. schrieb Pine W:
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?
What I meant in concrete terms was: let's start using wikidata items for tagging on commons, even though search results based on such tags will currently not yield very good results, due to the messy state of the ontology, and hope people fix the ontology to get better search results. If people use "poodle" to tag an image and it's not found when searching for "dog", this may lead to people investigating why that is, and coming up with ontology improvements to fix it.
What I DON'T mean is "let's automatically generate navigation boxes for wikipedia articles based on an imperfect ontology, and push them on everyone". I mean, using the ontology to generate navigation boxes for some kinds of articles may be a nice idea, and could indeed have the same effect - that people notice problems in the ontology, and fix them. But that would be something the local wiki communities decide to do, not something that comes from Wikidata or the Structured Data project.
The point I was trying to make is: the Wiki communities are rather good in creating structures that serve their purpose, but they do so pragmatically, along the behavior of the existing tools. So, rather than trying to work around the quirks of the ontology in software, the software should use very simply rules (such as following the subclass relation), and let people adopt the data to this behavior, if and when they find it useful to do so. This approach, over time, provides better results in my opinion.
Also, keep in mind that I was referring to an imperfect *improvement* of search. the alternative being to only return things tagged with "dog" when searching for "dog". I was not suggesting to degrade user experience in order to incentivize editors. I'm rather suggesting the opposite: let's NOT give people a reason tag images that show poodles with "poodle" and "dog" and "mammal" and "animal" and "pet" and...
-- Daniel Kinzler Principal Software Engineer, Core Platform Wikimedia Foundation
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the explanation. I think that I now better understand what you're proposing. This explanation of the proposal sounds reasonable to me in a way that my earlier understanding of the proposal did not.
By the way, I don't know what your normal work schedule is, but I usually don't expect staff to respond to non-urgent emails over the weekend, although I appreciate it. :) Waiting until Monday is usually fine.