Yes I agree. I think most of the discussion here has to do with people
conflating the concept of text as in Wikipedia sentences and the concept of
data as in Wikidata statements. When a user adds an image from Commons on
Wikipedia, the source of the image is generally not added to Wikipedia, and
I have never heard anyone complain about that except for image donors who
wished that their images *were* attributed when used on Wikipedia. The same
is true when Wikipedians add Wikidata statements from an item on Wikipedia.
A date statement in Wikidata for a painting may be indirectly referenced in
the item in another statement (the collection statement, or a "described at
url" statement). This is also true of the way the date field in the Commons
artwork template is used.
It is just as undesirable to clutter Wikipedia with a reference for such a
date from Wikidata as it is to reference the source of the file image when
including images, and so there will generally not be a reference for the
pulled date in the Wikidata infobox, because the user can always look up
the item for more information. Most paintings included on Wikipedia, with
or without infoboxes, do not reference the date field specifically - either
to the Commons image or to the article. When they do, this is often in
cases where the date has been disputed. Our goal is not to reference
everything, but to reference the things that need referencing.
On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The Wikimedia movement has always had an
important principle: that all
content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the first
decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been
considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia
article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.
Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to
people
that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and
that there is no guarantee
of reliability or fitness for use.
Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.
Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata...
<snip>
I agree that "reliable source" referencing and "crowdsourced content"
are
indeed principles of our movement. However, I disagree that Wikidata is
"jettisoning" them. In fact, quite the contrary!
The purpose of the statement "imported from --> English Wikipedia" in the
"reference" field of a Wikidata item's statement is PRECISELY to indicate
to the user that this information has not been INDEPENDENTLY verified to a
reliable source and that Wikipedia is NOT considered a reliable source.
Furthermore, it provides a PROVENANCE of that information to help stop
people from circular referencing. That is - clearly stating that the
specific fact in Wikidata has come from Wikipedia helps to avoid the
structured-data equivalent of "citogenisis":
https://xkcd.com/978/ If/When
a person can provide a reliable reference for that same fact, they are
encouraged to add an actual reference. Note, the wikidata statement used
for facts coming in from Wikipedia use the property "imported from". This
is deliberately different from the property "reference URL" which is what
you would use when adding an actual reference to a third-party reliable
online source.
Furthermore, the fact that many statements in Wikidata are not given a
reference (yet) is not necessarily a "problem". For example - this
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21481859 is a Wikidata item for a
scientific
publication with 2891 co-authors!! This is an extreme example, but it
demonstrates my point... None of those 2891 statements has a specific
reference listed for it, because all of them are self-evidently referenced
to the scientific publication itself. The same is true of the other
properties applied to this item (volume, publication date, title, page
number...). All of these could be "referenced" to the very first property
in the Wikidata item - the DOI of the scientific article:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 This
item is not "less reliable" because it doesn't have the same footnote
repeated almost three thousand times, but if you merely look at statistics
of "unreferenced wikidata statements" it would APPEAR that it is very
poorly cited.
So, I think we need a more nuanced view of what "proper referencing" means
in the context of Wikidata.
-Liam
wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>