On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Wikidata and Wikipedia have very different purposes: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia to be read; Wikidata is a database. No one reads a database. The whole purpose of a database is to have its content multiplied and surfaced elsewhere. Therefore it is even more essential that its content stand on solid ground.
I disagree with that. In my opinion Wikipedia and Wikidata do not have different purposes, they complement each other. In an ideal world all the data present in Wikidata should surface in Wikipedia, and be referenced from there. However it is expected that the data comes already referenced at *statement* level from Wikidata, when Wikipedia doesn't comply with those standards either. This assumes that the Wikidata community is a generator of perfectly referenced facts and that the Wikipedia communities are mere consumers of data. This is a toxic view because it goes against the core principle of wikis as a tool for taking ownership of the means of knowledge aggregation and distribution.
It has to be noted too, that in Wikidata many items have external identifiers, references, and sources, and they apply to the whole information contained, not just one single statement, that is something that should be taken into account when speaking about reliability.
Besides this discussion is trite. Quality comes from use, research and oversight, and without tools for working with wikidata from wikipedia, like connected infoboxes, there is no point in discussing about data quality, because as you said "no one reads a database"... except for a few people like me I guess :)
Cheers, Micru