On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
Andreas, you apparently did not read the following sentence: "Of course, the opposite is also true: it's a single point of openness, correction, information. "
Andrea,
I understand and appreciate your point, but I would like you to consider that what you say may be less true of Wikidata than it is for other Wikimedia wikis, for several reasons:
Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. are functionally open and correctable because people by and large view their content on Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. itself (or in places where the provenance is clearly indicated, thanks to CC BY-SA). The place where you read it is the same place where you can edit it. There is an "Edit" tab, and it really *is* easy to change the content. (It is certainly easy to correct a typo, which is how many of us started.)
With Wikidata, this is different. Wikidata, as a semantic wiki, is designed to be read by machines. These machines don't edit, they *propagate*. Wikidata is not a site that end users--human beings--will browse and consult the way people consult Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Commons, etc.
Wikidata is, or will be, of interest mostly to re-users--search engines and other intermediaries who will use its machine-readable data as an input to build and design their own content. And when they use Wikidata as an input, they don't have to acknowledge the source.
Allowing unattributed re-use may *seem* more open. But I contend that in practice it makes Wikidata *less* open as a wiki: because when people don't know where the information comes from, they are also unable to contribute at source. The underlying Wikimedia project effectively becomes invisible to them, a closed book.
That is not good for a crowdsourced project from multiple points of view.
Firstly, it impedes recruitment. Far fewer consumers of Wikidata information will become Wikidata editors, because they will typically find Wikidata content on other sites where Wikidata is not even mentioned.
Secondly, it reduces transparency. Data provenance is important, as Mark Graham and Heather Ford have pointed out.
Thirdly, it fails to encourage appropriate vigilance in the consumer. (The error propagation problems I've described in this thread all involved unattributed re-use of Wikimedia content.)
There are other reasons why Wikidata is less open, besides CC0 and the lack of attribution.
Wikidata is the least user-friendly Wikimedia wiki. The hurdle that newbies--even experienced Wikimedians--have to overcome to contribute is an order of magnitude higher than it is for other Wikimedia projects.
For a start, there is no Edit tab at the top of the page. When you go to Barack Obama's entry in Wikidata[1] for example, the word "Edit" is not to be found anywhere on the page. It does not look like a page you can edit (and indeed, members of the public can't edit it).
It took me a while to figure out that the item is protected (just like the Jerusalem item).
In other Wikimedia wikis that do have an "Edit" tab, that tab changes to "View source" if the page is protected, giving a visual indication of the page's status that people--Wikimedia insiders at least--can recognise.
Unprotected Wikidata items do have "edit" and "add" links, but they are less prominent. (The "add" link for adding new properties is hidden away at the very bottom of the page.) And when you do click "edit" or "add", it is not obvious what you are supposed to do, the way it is in text-based wikis.
The learning curve involved in actually editing a Wikidata item is far steeper than it is in other Wikimedia wikis. There is no Wikidata equivalent of the "correcting a typo" edit in Wikipedia. You need to go away and learn the syntax before you can do anything at all in Wikidata.
For all of these reasons I believe the systemic balance between information delivery (output) and ease of contribution (input) is substantially different for Wikidata than it is for any other Wikimedia wiki.
So, if you don't like it, maybe the Wikimedia movements is not suitable for you, maybe you'd like more working in Citizendium or something. There's no shame in it, and I really believe it: it's just a matter of choice.
I have been contributing to Wikimedia projects for ten years now. I consider it an important movement to be involved in, exactly per your arguments about openness and public involvement above. If openness is a strength, then it follows that Wikimedia as a movement is stronger for debate and dissent.
On a more personal level, I find the idea of free knowledge inspiring. At every Wikimedia event I have attended, that excitement and the joy of creation are in the air and communicate themselves. I relate to it, and share in it. There are many Wikimedia content creators whose I work I admire and respect, and who have become friends.
But I don't share the quasi-religious zeal that seems to suffuse some of the public discourse in the Wikimedia movement around free knowledge. In fact I find it subtly troubling. In actual practice, I see substantial downsides as well as upsides to the work the Wikimedia community is doing. But to be honest, whenever I meet other Wikimedians, they seem to see plenty of downsides too. :)
Keeping sight of the downsides is important if you want to provide a better service to the public.
I personally choose to believe in openness as a way to leverage good will from people, willingness to share knowledge. I believe Wikidata is going in the same direction, and I have not found evidence yet that the "power and centralisation" of data make the openness a problem of a different magnitudo, different from Wikipedia.
I'm happy to discuss this point specifically, as I think we can have a reasonable and constructive debate on this.
In part, this will depend on how and by whom the content will be re-used, and how aware end users will be where the data comes from. I think right now, it is too early to say.
Matters are not helped by the fact that without attribution, it will be very hard for us--or indeed anyone else--to track down who is and who is not using Wikidata content. Search engines in particular are very secretive about their sources of information.
Regards, Andreas