People keep mentioning VIAF in the context. VIAF is a federated service,
using the content of its various repositories--and is therefore no more
accurate than they are. For example, a major component in VIAF is the
Library of Congress Authority File. That file has always used author or
publisher statements as the evidence for birth dates without further
verification; in recent years, it has been also using information from WP
articles. (I suppose that's an improvement--we at least occasionally look
beyond what the person says about himself.)
On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:38 AM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 January 2016 at 11:24, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:33 AM Pete Forsyth
<peteforsyth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
(Note: I'm creating a new thread which
references several old ones; in
the
most recent, "Profile of Magnus
Manske," the conversation has drifted
back
to Wikidata, so that subject line is no longer
applicable.)
Andreas Kolbe has argued in multiple threads that Wikidata is
fundamentally
problematic, on the basis that it does not
require citations. (Please
correct me if I am mistaken about this core premise.)
Every statement on Wikidata /should/ be referenced, unless the statement
itself points to a reference (e.g. VIAF, images). However, at the moment,
this is not a requirement, as Wikidata is still in a steep growth phase.
Over the last few years, many statements were added by bots, which can
process e.g. Wikipedia, but would be hard pressed to find the original
reference for a statement.
To extend Magnus' point...
This is also the case on Wikipedia. Every Wikipedia sentence /should/ be
verified to a reliable source, and those without footnotes can be removed.
But, it is not a /requirement/ that every statement be verified. In short -
'verifiable not verified' is the minimum standard for inclusion of a
sentence in Wikipedia. The ratio of footnotes-to-sentences in Wikipedia
articles is on average probably much lower than the ratio of
references-to-statements in Wikidata. It's just that we have more easily
available /quantitative/ statistics for Wikidata that we do for Wikipedia,
which makes it easy for Wikidata-critics to point to the number of
un-referenced statements in Wikidata as a simple measure of quality, even
though many of them DO meet the "verifiable, even if not yet verified"
minimum standard that we accept for "stubs" on Wikipedia.
For example: even in a Feature Article Wikipedia biography, I've never seen
a footnote /specifically/ for the fact that the subject is "a human". That
reference is implied by other footnotes - citing for the birthdate, or
occupation for example. By comparison, in Wikidata, some people seem to be
a feeling that statements like "instance of -> human", "gender->
male" need
to be given a specific reference before they can be considered reliable.
This is even when there are other statements in the same Wikidata item that
reference biography-authority control numbers (e.g. VIAF).
Yes, ideally, every statement could be given a reference in Wikidata, but
ideally so should every sentence in Wikipedia. In reality we do accept
"stub" Wikipedia articles that have 5 sentences and 1 Reliable Source
footnote. Furthermore, we also do also have Wikidata properties that are,
in effect, "self verifying": like the "VIAF identifier" property -
which
links to that authority control database, or the "image" property - which
links directly to a file on Commons. So, simply counting the number of
statements vs. the number of references in those statements on Wikidata and
concluding that Wikidata is therefore inherently unreliable is both
simplistic and quite misleading.
-Liam
wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata
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