Since end of June I am following closely (via Listerialists) all changes
in Wikdata on the 15000 object i have created and have special interest
in. They are about adm units in Sweden, mostly historical and I had not
anticipated any big amount of change., But in reality there are lots,
10-30 a week, and even if mostly on iw-links and update on descriptions,
it has been positive and rewarding (like a change followed by a
constructive discussion with a user from Russia)
BUT there has ben a lot of bad edits (around a dozen), mostly
wellmeaning, but also some a bit worse. Some by bot, where the user
undid the changes, but worst has been the merges initiated with hash-tag
Distr game. Here really stupid and devastating merges has been done and
crazy totally erroneous updates. And here feedback does not work.
For me it look like children using much too powerful tools, and they
perceive them as games. (the tools seems to give a list of suggestion of
things, like merges, and you just press a key to have it done, and when
it is so easy, it invites unintelligent users to "play" and win points
by pressing key for whatever suggesting turning up, in my cases anything
sharing a coordinate, a village, church, adm area etc)
I do hope this is not a misdirected initiative to get new users, by
letting them go havoc on our data? (the tools could of course be good,
when used constructively in the hands of competent users, but ?game?)
Anders