yes, it is an old issue, what you say it's right but I would be more optimistic. To summarize my view (I couls send you more information privately)
1. Wikidata largely reflected what Wikipedia indicated, and that was not the right way to make it grow, but that was also the past. At the moment, the reference of the content is increasing, the clean-up too. In some areas, wikidata items are also created before the wikipedia articles nowadays.
2. new tools are great and will do a lot, but it's users who do the real tricks. You have to start to bring local users to wikidata, show them how it can be used (automatic infoboxes, fast creation of stubs, automatic lists, detecing missing images). They will start to fix the issues, curating their wikipedia, wikidata and also indirectly influence the other ones.
3. IMHO, the wikidata ecosystem is not so bad, it could have more expert users with real knowledge of topics, but commons with millions of automatically imported files, and tons of poorly described and uncategorized images faces a much worse perspective. You need more tools there than on wikidata, at the moment, if you want to keep some balanced workflow. What is really missing on wikidata are mostly active projects to coordinate and catalyze the ongoing efforts. This one https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ancient_Greece made miracles, for example. But I couldn't find one about peer-reviewed researchers or photographers to name a few, at least in the past months. Investing on this aspect would not change the final situation on wikidata (that will be positive for me), but it would speed up the process. it will also influence much more the content on local wikis because it will bring content-related users closer together and increase their wikidata literacy with lower effort. 4. In the end, even with a good high quality wikidata platform, there will always be communities that will not integrated in wikidata massively... but that's also a good thing for pluralism. You can't assume that a discrepancy is always a clue for a mistake (I am sure the examples of your experience are, of course), on the long term some of them are simply effects of gray areas that need to wait to be resolved even at the level of the sources. Insome fields, such as taxonomy, there is some confusion and asymmetric organization of the content and will never be solved easily. But in the other areas they probably will. Alex
Il Domenica 15 Luglio 2018 22:37, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com ha scritto:
Hoi, Wikidata is a reflection of all the Wikimedia projects, particularly the Wikipedias. Both Wikidata and Wikipedia are secondary sources and when two Wikipedias have opposing information on singular information, it is a cop out to state both "opinions" on Wikidata and leave it at that.
Given that Wikidata largely reflects what a Wikipedia indicates, it is important to curate such differences. The first thing to consider is are we interested at all in knowing about "false facts" and then how we can indicate differences to our editing and reading community.
I have been editing about Africa for a long time now and I find that the content about Africa is woefully underdeveloped. Best Wikipedia practice has it that cities and villages are linked to "administrative territorial entities" like provinces and districts and I have added such relations from primary to secondary entities. Adding such information to villages and cities as well is too much for me. The basic principle is that I am being bold in doing so. I do relate to existing items and I have curated a lot of crap data so far. The result is that Wikidata in places differs considerably from Wikipedias, particularly the English Wikipedia.
As topics like the ones about Africa are severely underdeveloped, just adding new data is a 100% improvement even when arguably adding sources is a good thing. By being bold, by starting from a Wikipedia as a base line, it is important to note that not adding sources is established practice in Wikidata.
The issue I raise is that when "another" Wikipedia considers its information superior, it is all too easy to make accusations of adding "fake facts" particularly when it is not obvious that the "other" Wikipedia provides better information. To counter such insular behaviour, it becomes relevant to consider how we can indicate discrepancies between stated facts in any Wikimedia project vis a vis Wikidata. Obviously it would be wonderful when the total of all our projects are considered in a visualisation.
Particularly when a subject is of little interest to our current editor community, the data in the Wikipedias and by inference in Wikidata is weak. Many of the subjects, Africa just as one example, are relevant to a public, both a reading and editing public, that we want to develop. Without tools that help us curate our differences we will rely on insular opinions and every project is only a part of what we aim to achieve in all our projects. We will have a hard time growing our audience.
NB this is an old, old issue and it is not going away. Thanks, GerardM
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