Hoi,
This is a topic that deserves its own thread. Citations are problematic on
so many levels it is hard to decide where to begin.
When the question is can we get a lot of citations in Wikidata, relevant
citations, the answer is yes. It takes a lot of work and a lot has been
done by the lovely people of DBpedia. They have data ready to link
citations from Wikipedia to statements and it is fairly easy to gamify
this. It means that it will be people who judge if a citation actually fits
an existing statement.
When this is to be done with a high level of confidence, it helps when
links and red links get the same treatment as interwiki links. They would
all be associated with Wikidata. It will improve the quality of all
Wikipedias measurably and it will also do a lot to improve disambiguation.
The improvement may not be that much in the wiki links compared with the
interwiki links but the red links will bring us the confidence what
articles exist in other Wikipedias that have many red links in "your"
project.
Citations are part of the quality issue. When Wikidata is to improve its
quality there are several other approaches that will increase the
confidence of the quality of Wikidata. When multiple sources agree on a
statement, the statements where there is no agreement are the best targets
for attention. With a relation between citations in both Wikipedia and
Wikidata (the DBpedia link), it will be easy to signal to a Wikipedia for
help with such issues. This may bring our communities more together as well.
Citations itself have a problem of their own. What do we do with debunked
sources. Do we agree that a program of a conference is a source. How do we
signal unease about sources when an author proves to be "problematic". What
to do with the inherent conflict of interest that is pushed by people in an
industry who want to include their data in Wikidata..
A fringe benefit of providing links and red links with Wikidata items is
that it becomes easy to update the lists in use by "Women in Red". Many
more of the subjects they want to write about will become available and,
when an article is written it is easily removed from the lists. They
already use this approach by using the Listeria lists.
When you read all this, you may ask yourself is this technically hard to
do. It is not. Much of the software / functionality / data already exists
in an embryonic way. BUT it works. There is only one question left: Are we
ready to fix these quality issues?
Thanks,
GerardM