Hoi, The difference between the use of quality images from Commons and establishing what is correct is quite distinct. With Commons it is an esthetic difference, with these lists it is about the credibility of the data involved. Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 09:53, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:

Gerard, I think this was always the case. Most Wikidatans are as at home on Wikipedia as they are on Commons. The issue you describe also happened to Commons - both communities feel the other is less focussed on quality. Many Commonists spend hours on high quality images and these are rarely picked up by Wikipedia unless a Commonist notices and does so in their own language. There is no requirement for Wikipedians to get to know any other project and this is normal wiki behavior. We don't want anyone to feel pressured to do anything they feel uncomfortable doing. It's already difficult to get Wikipedians to do small tasks like add catagories to their articles. The list of things necessary to create an acceptable article on Wikipedia just seems to get longer and longer, while the associated work for illustrations of that article or for data of that article is not even mentioned in current AfC policies on Wikipedia. I have thought about this, but I still think we need to break down the list of things necessary to make new short articles on Wikipedia, not extend the list. So in summary, I think that what you describe is normal predictable behavior for a "Wikipedia support" project such as Commons and Wikidata. This will change as more and more external users find out that Commons and Wikidata are valuable resources in and of themselves. This is already the case for many GLAMs which have found collaborations with Commons to be valuable experiences. I have high hopes this will become the case for Wikidata as well. Jane

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hoi, At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia.

Lists

...

have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and

arguably

...

they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach.

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there

are

...

already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia

quality

...

because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.

There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality

issue

...

both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how

to

...

deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all.

I blogged about it.. Thanks, GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.htm...

...

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Hoi, So far such lists have been produced for bigger Wikipedias but essentially it is potentially an issue for any and all Wikis that have data that may exist on Wikidata or linked through Wikidata on external sources. Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 12:33, Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:

Gerard, Who were you expecting would respond from the Wikipedias? Cheers, Peter

-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Friday, 20 November 2015 9:18 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List; Research into Wikimedia content and communities; WikiData-l Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

Hoi, At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach.

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia quality because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.

There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality issue both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how to deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all.

I blogged about it.. Thanks, GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.htm... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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Hoi, That is indeed a problem. So far it has been lists, often well formatted lists that do not have a workflow, are not updated regularly. I have added these issues as a wishlist item to work on. [1]

You have to appreciate that when a list of problematic issues is listed with over 100 items, it is no longer easy or obvious that you want to add and follow 100 talk pages.This is one of the big differences between Wikipedia think and Wikidata think. I care about a lot of data, data that is linked. Analogous to the "Kevin Bacon steps of separation" I want all items easily and obviously connected. <grin> That is another quality goal for Wikidata </grin>.

Given the state of Wikipedia, most articles have an article, easy and obvious tasks like fact checking and adding sources is exactly what we are looking for for maintaining our community. Add relevance to the cocktail, we know that these facts are likely to have issues, and you appreciate why this may help us with our quality and with our community issues. Thanks, GerardM

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey#Visibility_fo...

On 21 November 2015 at 07:11, Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:

How are you notifying the Wikipedias/Wikipedians? Do you leave a message on the talk page of the relevant article? Cheers, Peter

-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Saturday, 21 November 2015 12:23 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

Hoi, So far such lists have been produced for bigger Wikipedias but essentially it is potentially an issue for any and all Wikis that have data that may exist on Wikidata or linked through Wikidata on external sources. Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 12:33, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:

...

Gerard, Who were you expecting would respond from the Wikipedias? Cheers, Peter

-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: Friday, 20 November 2015 9:18 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List; Research into Wikimedia content and communities; WikiData-l Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues

Hoi, At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such

outreach.

...

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia quality because in their view, Wikipedians do not care

about its own quality.

...

Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.

There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality issue both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how to deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if

at all.

...

I blogged about it.. Thanks, GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikiped ia.html _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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Indeed, the things that make a Wikipedia article high quality (such as well written and engaging prose) are not necessarily the same things that are useful for a data-driven product like Wikidata. When Wikidata offers assistance to another project, and that assistance is not received enthusiastically because the project feels it will not improve their own quality metrics; that is not a "black box" communication problem, nor is it anyone in particular's fault, that is an issue of differing priorities.

Cheers, Craig

On 20 November 2015 at 23:30, WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers@gmail.com

wrote:

My experience is that pretty much all Wikimedians care about quality, though some have different, even diametrically opposed views as to what quality means and which things are cosmetic or crucial.

My experience of the sadly dormant death anomaly project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table was that people react positively to being told "here is a list of anomalies on your language wikipedia" especially if those anomalies are relatively serious. My experience of edits on many different languages is that wikipedians appreciate someone who improves articles, even if you don't speak their language. Dismissing any of our thousand wikis as a "black box" is I think less helpful.

One of the great opportunities of Wikidata is to do the sort of data driven anomaly finding that we pioneered with the death anomalies report. But we always need to remember that there are cultural difference between wikis, and not just in such things as the age at which we assume people are dead. Diplomacy is a useful skill in cross wiki work.

On 20 November 2015 at 07:18, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia.
> Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and
> arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata
> for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach.
>
> When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside
> world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there
are
> already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia
quality
> because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.
>
> Arguably known issues with quality are the easiest to solve.
>
> There are many ways to approach this subject. It is indeed a quality
issue
> both for Wikidata and Wikipedia. It can be seen as a research issue; how
to
> deal with quality and how do such mechanisms function if at all.
>
> I blogged about it..
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
>
>
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2015/11/what-kind-of-box-is-wikipedia.html
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
_______________________________________________
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Folks, regardless of which views we hold, we're all on the same side - can we try and be a little less acerbic please - it is Friday after all!

Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992

Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

*Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

On 20 November 2015 at 13:50, Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com wrote:

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there

are

...

already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia

quality

...

because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Right. When some users blindly dump random data to Wikidata, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikipedia that argue not to bother about Wikidata quality because in their view, Wikidatans do not care about its own quality.

For instance, take a look at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM/Archive_1

Erm -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Offtopic: Gerard, during the last half an hour or so, I am just getting emails from you inside of this thread (including wiki-research list). I thought my phone has a bug. It's useful to write a larger email with addressing all the issues. Besides other things, with this frequency, you'll spend your monthly email quota for this list the day after tomorrow.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, <grin> quality is different things </grin> I do care about quality but I do not necessarily agree with you how to best achieve it. Arguably bots are better and getting data into Wikidata than people. This means that the error rate of bots is typically better than what people do. It is all in the percentages.

I have always said that the best way to improve quality is by comparing sources. When Wikidata has no data, it is arguably better to import data from any source. When the quality is 90% correct, there is already 100% more data. When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the same, you only have to check 15% and decide what is right. When you compare with two distinct sources, the percentage that differs changes again.. :) In this way it makes sense to check errors

It does not help when you state that either party has people that care or do not care about quality. By providing a high likelihood that something is problematic, you will learn who actually makes a difference. It however started with having data to compare in the first place Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 14:50, Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there

are

...

already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia

quality

...

because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Right. When some users blindly dump random data to Wikidata, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikipedia that argue not to bother about Wikidata quality because in their view, Wikidatans do not care about its own quality.

For instance, take a look at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM/Archive_1

Erm -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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Sorry to read that Fae, but in your specific case I do think your time is spent more productively on Commons, because the value of your contributions there is huge. Having created Wikidata items for many of your Commons uploads, I think it may be worthwhile at some point to try and get someone to run a Fae-Wikidata-conversion bot to try and get as much data as possible from your uploads moved over, but until then, please go ahead with whatever it is you like to do best. In my last mail I was thinking about Wikipedians, but of course the same is true for all of the sister projects.

On Sat, Nov 21, 2015 at 1:08 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:

On 20 November 2015 at 22:47, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:

...

Offtopic: Gerard, during the last half an hour or so, I am just getting emails from you inside of this thread (including wiki-research list). I thought my phone has a bug. It's useful to write a larger email with addressing all the issues. Besides other things, with this frequency, you'll spend your monthly email quota for this list the day after tomorrow.

+1

I keep an open mind for supporting Wikidata in association with my Commons uploads. This thread going over a series of old gripes against other projects, with a lack of new proposals, has diminished my interest. For me, this effectively burns out the word "Wikidata" for a month.

Fae

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Hoi, You conflate two issues. First when facts differ, it should be possible to explain why they differ. Only when there is no explanation particularly when there are no sources, there is an issue. In come real sources. When someone died on 7-5-1759 and another source has a different date, it may be the difference between a Julian and a Gregorian date. When a source makes this plain, one fact has been proven to be incorrect. When the date was 1759, it is obvious that the other date is more precise.. The point is very much that Wikipedia values sources and so does Wikidata. USE THEM and find that data sources may be wrong when they are. In this way we improve quality.

Many data sources have data from the same origin. It does not follow that without original sources they are all right. Quite the reverse. It does however take humans to be bold, to determine where a booboo has been made. Yes, we do decide what is right or wrong, we do this when we research an issue and that is exactly what this is about. It all starts with determining a source.

In the mean time, Wikidata is negligent in stating sources. The worst example is in the "primary sources" tool. It is bad because it is brought to us as the best work flow for adding uncertain data to Wikidata. So the world is not perfect but hey it is a wiki :) Thanks, GerardM

On 21 November 2015 at 00:32, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

...

... *When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the same,**you only have to check 15% and decide what is righ**t*....

​this very statement highlights one issue that ​

​will always be a problem between Wikidata and Wikipedias. Wikipedia, at least in my 10 years of experience on en:wp is that when you have multiple sources that differ you highlight the existence of those ​sources and the conflict of information we dont decide what is right or wrong.

On 21 November 2015 at 06:35, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, <grin> quality is different things </grin> I do care about quality but I

do

...

not necessarily agree with you how to best achieve it. Arguably bots are better and getting data into Wikidata than people. This means that the error rate of bots is typically better than what people do. It is all in the percentages.

I have always said that the best way to improve quality is by comparing sources. When Wikidata has no data, it is arguably better to import data from any source. When the quality is 90% correct, there is already 100% more data. When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the same, you only have to check 15% and decide what is right. When you compare

with

...

two distinct sources, the percentage that differs changes again.. :) In this way it makes sense to check errors

It does not help when you state that either party has people that care or do not care about quality. By providing a high likelihood that something

is

...

problematic, you will learn who actually makes a difference. It however started with having data to compare in the first place Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 14:50, Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the

outside

...

...

...

world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment

there

...

...

are

...

already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about Wikipedia

quality

...

because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own quality.

Right. When some users blindly dump random data to Wikidata, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikipedia that argue not to bother about Wikidata quality because in their view, Wikidatans do not care about its own quality.

For instance, take a look at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM/Archive_1

Erm -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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-- GN. President Wikimedia Australia WMAU: http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/User:Gnangarra Photo Gallery: http://gnangarra.redbubble.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Hoi, I respect the policy of Wikipedia. However, when multiple Wikipedias differ and when there is no sourcing does this policy hold? When Wikidata has no attributable sources but multiple statements is it not conceivable that things are easy and obvious.. that they are wrong?

When you talk about the FA status of articles, you are considering something totally alien to what is at stake. Typically we do not have credible sources at Wikidata and typically there is an issue with the data.

When Wikidata is as mature as en.wp we will have on average 10 statements for every item. Currently half of our items have at most two statements. We do find issues in any source by comparing them. It does make sense to make this effort. It is an obvious way of improving quality in all of our projects and even beyond that. Thanks, GerardM

On 21 November 2015 at 10:26, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

...

Many data sources have data from the same origin. It does not follow that without original sources they are all right. Quite the reverse. It does however take humans to be bold, to determine where a booboo has been

made.

...

Yes, we do decide what is right or wrong,

​No we dont decide what is right or wrong, en:wp has very specific core policies about this

• ​Original research - we dont draw conclusions from available data
• NPOV​ -

*which means presenting information without editorial bias*, ​ the moment we make that decision about whats right we exceed the boundaries of our core pillars.... ​dont know, uncertain or conflicting information means exactly that we dont get to choose what we think is right

​The data article writers work with isnt black and white and its definitely not set in stone Wikipedia content is a constant evolving collation of knowledge, we should be careful when ever we put in place a process that makes information definitive because people become reluctant to add to that and they are even less likely to challenge something that has been cast in stone already regardless of the inaccuracy of that casting . We see it within Wikipedia when articles are elevated to FA status with the number of editors who fiercely defend that current/correct version against any changes regardless of the merit in the information being added with comments like "discuss it on talk page first" "revert good faith edit"

the more disjointed knowledge becomes the harder it is to keep it current, accurate the more isolated that knowledge. Then power over making changes takes precedence over productivity, accuracy and openness

On 21 November 2015 at 16:12, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, You conflate two issues. First when facts differ, it should be possible

to

...

explain why they differ. Only when there is no explanation particularly when there are no sources, there is an issue. In come real sources. When someone died on 7-5-1759 and another source has a different date, it may

be

...

the difference between a Julian and a Gregorian date. When a source makes this plain, one fact has been proven to be incorrect. When the date was 1759, it is obvious that the other date is more precise.. The point is

very

...

much that Wikipedia values sources and so does Wikidata. USE THEM and

find

...

that data sources may be wrong when they are. In this way we improve quality.

Many data sources have data from the same origin. It does not follow that without original sources they are all right. Quite the reverse. It does however take humans to be bold, to determine where a booboo has been

made.

...

Yes, we do decide what is right or wrong, we do this when we research an issue and that is exactly what this is about. It all starts with determining a source.

In the mean time, Wikidata is negligent in stating sources. The worst example is in the "primary sources" tool. It is bad because it is brought to us as the best work flow for adding uncertain data to Wikidata. So the world is not perfect but hey it is a wiki :) Thanks, GerardM

On 21 November 2015 at 00:32, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

... *When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the same,**you

only

...

...

have to check 15% and decide what is righ**t*....

​this very statement highlights one issue that ​

​will always be a problem between Wikidata and Wikipedias. Wikipedia,

at

...

...

least in my 10 years of experience on en:wp is that when you have

multiple

...

sources that differ you highlight the existence of those ​sources and

the

...

...

conflict of information we dont decide what is right or wrong.

On 21 November 2015 at 06:35, Gerard Meijssen <

gerard.meijssen@gmail.com

...

...

wrote:

...

Hoi, <grin> quality is different things </grin> I do care about quality

but

...

I

...

do

...

not necessarily agree with you how to best achieve it. Arguably bots

are

...

...

better and getting data into Wikidata than people. This means that

the

...

...

...

error rate of bots is typically better than what people do. It is all

in

...

...

the percentages.

I have always said that the best way to improve quality is by

comparing

...

...

...

sources. When Wikidata has no data, it is arguably better to import

data

...

...

from any source. When the quality is 90% correct, there is already

100%

...

...

...

more data. When 100% is compared with another source and 85% is the

same,

...

...

you only have to check 15% and decide what is right. When you compare

with

...

two distinct sources, the percentage that differs changes again.. :)

In

...

...

...

this way it makes sense to check errors

It does not help when you state that either party has people that

care

...

or

...

...

do not care about quality. By providing a high likelihood that

something

...

is

...

problematic, you will learn who actually makes a difference. It

however

...

...

...

started with having data to compare in the first place Thanks, GerardM

On 20 November 2015 at 14:50, Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com

wrote:

...

...

...

On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

When Wikipedia is a black box, not communicating about with the

outside

...

...

...

world, at some stage the situation becomes toxic. At this moment

there

...

...

are

...

already those at Wikidata that argue not to bother about

Wikipedia

...

...

...

...

quality

...

because in their view, Wikipedians do not care about its own

quality.

...

...

...

...

Right. When some users blindly dump random data to Wikidata, not communicating about with the outside world, at some stage the

situation

...

...

...

becomes toxic. At this moment there are already those at Wikipedia

that

...

...

...

argue not to bother about Wikidata quality because in their view, Wikidatans do not care about its own quality.

For instance, take a look at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:GerardM/Archive_1

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...

...

...

<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org

?subject=unsubscribe>

...

...

...

...

---

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On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 11:32 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

​this very statement highlights one issue that ​

​will always be a problem between Wikidata and Wikipedias. Wikipedia, at least in my 10 years of experience on en:wp is that when you have multiple sources that differ you highlight the existence of those ​sources and the conflict of information we dont decide what is right or wrong.

There was an interesting Oxford Internet Institute article recently discussing the potential problems that can result when Wikidata and/or the Knowledge Graph provide the Internet public with a single answer: nuances get lost, and provenance becomes obscured.

http://cii.oii.ox.ac.uk/2015/11/05/semantic-cities/

The underlying study, "Semantic Cities: Coded Geopolitics and the Rise of the Semantic Web", by Heather Ford and Mark Graham, is here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2682459

Moreover, I was somewhat surprised to learn the other day that, apparently, over 80 percent of Wikidata statements are either unreferenced or only referenced to a Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Citing_as_a_public_service....

That seems like a recipe for disaster, given that Wikidata feeds the Google Knowledge Graph and Bing Satori to some extent.

Thoughts?

some resposnes to Leila comments

1. Its not a disaster but it is a serious concern, we know from past experiences that it goes to the heart of the projects long term credibility, Countless hours and funds have gone into redressing Wikipedias reputation and still after 8 years of doing this we get bagged, we are still answering these questions. why send Wikidata done that track when we all understand the importance of referencing or in more theological perspective "if we cant learn from history, why do we spend so many resources recording history"

2. referencing is a very valuable thing for all data, that should be a starting point for the spectrum and Wikidata, rather than a goal or end point. Wikipeidas still have unreferenced material 15 years after it started

3. I'd disagree if the data isnt referenced then its of no value, Wikipedias are a better place to look

4.Wikipedia reference isnt ideal but it is better than nothing, providing that reference is to a permanent link rather than just a article at least then if the information is changed there is some ability to recover the original source. In general a circular reference is a bad out come

5.People need to able to trust all data in WikiData, otherwise they just wont use it because as Wikidata expands the same PR firms, interest groups which have seen so many of WP issues will gravitate to the easier to manipulate WikiData

Lets build something based on the lessons learnt on Wikipedia over the last 15 years rather than duplicate those missteps

On 24 November 2015 at 06:18, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hi Andreas,

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:15 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

Moreover, I was somewhat surprised to learn the other day that,

apparently,

...

over 80 percent of Wikidata statements are either unreferenced or only referenced to a Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Citing_as_a_public_service....

...

That seems like a recipe for disaster, given that Wikidata feeds the

Google

...

Knowledge Graph and Bing Satori to some extent.

Thoughts?

Here are my thoughts:

1. No, it's not a recipe for disaster. :-) I expand below.

2. People sit at the different parts of the spectrum when it comes to the

issues around Wikidata references. What almost all these people have in common is that they know having references is a very valuable thing for Wikidata (or any other knowledge base for that matter).

3. As a researcher, as long as the data is in Wikidata, with or without a

reference, I'm already some steps ahead. If there is no reference, I have a starting point to look for a reference for that specific value, and in that process, I may find conflicting data with new references. For a project in a growing stage, these are opportunities, not blockers.

4. I hear a lot of sensitivity about referencing Wikidata claim values to

Wikipedia. I hear people's concerns (having loops in referencing mechanisms is not good) but I do not consider the existence of Wikipedia references an issue and I certainly prefer a Wikipedia reference over no reference, especially if the date the information was extracted at is also tracked somewhere in Wikidata. Giving information to the researcher that the data has come from Wikipedia will give him/her a head-start about where to continue the search.

5. I see a need to give the users of open data a chance to use data with

more knowledge and control. For example, if you are an app developer, you should be able to figure out relatively easily what data in Wikidata you can fully trust, and what data you may want to skip using in your app. At the moment, some part of the community considers a value with a non- Wikipedia reference approved/monitored by a human as trustworthy (this is no written rule, I'm summarizing my current understanding based on discussions with some of the Wikidata community members, including myself :-). But, among other things, the reference in Wikidata may not be a trustworthy reference. We should surface how much trust one should have in the values in Wikidata to the end-user.

What is amazing is: There are many great things one can do based on the data that is being gathered in Wikidata. We should all work together to improve that data, but we should also acknowledge that our attention is split across many projects (this is definitely the case for me), and as a result, we will be seeing steady and smooth improvements in Wikidata, and not sudden and very fast improvements. We need to stay curious, excited, committed, and patient. :-)

Leila

Disclaimer: These are my personal views about references in Wikidata, and not necessarily the views of my team or the Wikimedia Foundation. :-) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

...

5.People need to able to trust all data in WikiData, otherwise they just wont use it because as Wikidata expands the same PR firms, interest

groups

...

which have seen so many of WP issues will gravitate to the easier to manipulate WikiData

I think the potential problem here is far worse: people *will use* the data, because their lack of trustworthiness, as amply described in the Wikidata disclaimer[1], is no longer visible when they're displayed as "fact" by dominant search engines.

It's worth mentioning:

Dominant search engines do not rely on one source of information to surface results, they get information from many sources, weigh the responses they get based on the trust on the sources and many other factors, and aggregate to find the best answer to be shown to the user. I just used "chicken pox" as a search query in Google, I see an information box on the right-hand-side of the page about the disease, and when I click on Sources I get this page https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2364942?p=medical_conditions&rd=1 ("See where we found the medical information") which shows all the sources Google has used to retrieve information about chicken pox from, nothing in that list starts with wiki. Of course, this is not the case for all search queries, for some of them, Google still uses Wikipedia snippets.

Leila

this isnt about how or whats of Google its about ensuring that what we do is trustworthy

On 25 November 2015 at 08:12, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:26 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

It's worth mentioning:

Dominant search engines do not rely on one source of information to

surface

...

results, they get information from many sources, weigh the responses they get based on the trust on the sources and many other factors, and

aggregate

...

to find the best answer to be shown to the user.

Have you never seen Google display gross Wikipedia vandalism?[1][2] Cases like that make it very clear that the Wikimedia content in question entered Google directly, without human oversight or cross-checking against other sources. What you describe sounds good, but it didn't happen.

If even transient vandalism passes through (the Finnish vandalism was reportedly deleted in Wikipedia within minutes), then so can more subtle and long-lived errors and falsehoods.

Similarly, Bing Satori's timeline is simply made up of verbatim Wikipedia sentences containing a numerical year.

We know far too little about how search engines import Wikipedia and Wikidata content, and what proportion of content is checked and how.

...

I just used "chicken pox" as a search query in Google, I see an

information

...

box on the right-hand-side of the page about the disease, and when I

click

...

on Sources I get this page <

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2364942?p=medical_conditions&...

...

...

("See where we found the medical information") which shows all the

sources

...

Google has used to retrieve information about chicken pox from, nothing

in

...

that list starts with wiki. Of course, this is not the case for all

search

...

queries, for some of them, Google still uses Wikipedia snippets.

For medical queries, Google (rightly) prefers other sources, so those queries are not presently affected.

[1]

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-world-series-cardinals-blunder-17587.htm... [2]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_vandalism_in_Google_infobo... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Hoi, To start of, results from the past are no indications of results in the future. It is the disclaimer insurance companies have to state in all their adverts in the Netherlands. When you continue and make it a "theological" issue, you lose me because I am not of this faith, far from it. Wikidata is its own project and it is utterly dissimilar from Wikipedia.To start of Wikidata has been a certified success from the start. The improvement it brought by bringing all interwiki links together is enormous.That alone should be a pointer that Wikipedia think is not realistic.

To continue, people have been importing data into Wikidata from the start. They are the statements you know and, it was possible to import them from Wikipedia because of these interwiki links. So when you call for sources, it is fairly save to assume that those imports are supported by the quality of the statements of the Wikipedias and if anything, that is also where they typically fail because many assumptions at Wikipedia are plain wrong at Wikidata. For instance a listed building is not the organisation the building is known for. At Wikidata they each need their own item and associated statements.

Wikidata is already a success for other reasons. VIAF no longer links to Wikipedia but to Wikidata. The biggest benefit of this move is for people who are not interested in English. Because of this change VIAF links through Wikidata to all Wikipedias not only en.wp. Consequently people may find through VIAF Wikipedia articles in their own language through their library systems.

So do not forget about Wikipedia and the lessons learned. These lessons are important to Wikipedia. However, they do not necessarily apply to Wikidata particularly when you approach Wikidata as an opportunity to do things in a different way. Set theory, a branch of mathematics, is exactly what we need. When we have data at Wikidata of a given quality.. eg 90% and we have data at another source with a given quality eg 90%, we can compare the two and find a subset where the two sources do not match. When we curate the differences, it is highly likely that we improve quality at Wikidata or at the other source. With a proper workflow and an iterative approach to multiple sources, we will spend time adding sources and improving quality. This is more productive than religiously adding sources for every statement. It also brings us better information in less time. I hope this will help people understand that Wikidata is not Wikipedia and, that is a good thing. Thanks, GerardM

On 24 November 2015 at 00:37, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

some resposnes to Leila comments

1. Its not a disaster but it is a serious concern, we know from past

experiences that it goes to the heart of the projects long term credibility, Countless hours and funds have gone into redressing Wikipedias reputation and still after 8 years of doing this we get bagged, we are still answering these questions. why send Wikidata done that track when we all understand the importance of referencing or in more theological perspective "if we cant learn from history, why do we spend so many resources recording history"

2. referencing is a very valuable thing for all data, that should be a

starting point for the spectrum and Wikidata, rather than a goal or end point. Wikipeidas still have unreferenced material 15 years after it started

3. I'd disagree if the data isnt referenced then its of no value,

Wikipedias are a better place to look

4.Wikipedia reference isnt ideal but it is better than nothing, providing that reference is to a permanent link rather than just a article at least then if the information is changed there is some ability to recover the original source. In general a circular reference is a bad out come

5.People need to able to trust all data in WikiData, otherwise they just wont use it because as Wikidata expands the same PR firms, interest groups which have seen so many of WP issues will gravitate to the easier to manipulate WikiData

Lets build something based on the lessons learnt on Wikipedia over the last 15 years rather than duplicate those missteps

On 24 November 2015 at 06:18, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hi Andreas,

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:15 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com

wrote:

...

...

Moreover, I was somewhat surprised to learn the other day that,

apparently,

...

over 80 percent of Wikidata statements are either unreferenced or only referenced to a Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Citing_as_a_public_service....

...

...

That seems like a recipe for disaster, given that Wikidata feeds the

Google

...

Knowledge Graph and Bing Satori to some extent.

Thoughts?

Here are my thoughts:

1. No, it's not a recipe for disaster. :-) I expand below.

2. People sit at the different parts of the spectrum when it comes to the

issues around Wikidata references. What almost all these people have in common is that they know having references is a very valuable thing for Wikidata (or any other knowledge base for that matter).

3. As a researcher, as long as the data is in Wikidata, with or without a

reference, I'm already some steps ahead. If there is no reference, I

have a

...

starting point to look for a reference for that specific value, and in

that

...

process, I may find conflicting data with new references. For a project

in

...

a growing stage, these are opportunities, not blockers.

4. I hear a lot of sensitivity about referencing Wikidata claim values to

Wikipedia. I hear people's concerns (having loops in referencing

mechanisms

...

is not good) but I do not consider the existence of Wikipedia references

an

...

issue and I certainly prefer a Wikipedia reference over no reference, especially if the date the information was extracted at is also tracked somewhere in Wikidata. Giving information to the researcher that the data has come from Wikipedia will give him/her a head-start about where to continue the search.

5. I see a need to give the users of open data a chance to use data with

more knowledge and control. For example, if you are an app developer, you should be able to figure out relatively easily what data in Wikidata you can fully trust, and what data you may want to skip using in your app. At the moment, some part of the community considers a value with a non- Wikipedia reference approved/monitored by a human as trustworthy (this is no written rule, I'm summarizing my current understanding based on discussions with some of the Wikidata community members, including myself :-). But, among other things, the reference in Wikidata may not be a trustworthy reference. We should surface how much trust one should have

in

...

the values in Wikidata to the end-user.

What is amazing is: There are many great things one can do based on the data that is being gathered in Wikidata. We should all work together to improve that data, but we should also acknowledge that our attention is split across many projects (this is definitely the case for me), and as a result, we will be seeing steady and smooth improvements in Wikidata, and not sudden and very fast improvements. We need to stay curious, excited, committed, and patient. :-)

Leila

Disclaimer: These are my personal views about references in Wikidata, and not necessarily the views of my team or the Wikimedia Foundation. :-) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

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On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

The Wikimedia movement has always had an important principle: that all content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the first decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.

Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to people that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and that there is no guarantee of reliability or fitness for use.

Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.

Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata...

<snip>

I agree that "reliable source" referencing and "crowdsourced content" are indeed principles of our movement. However, I disagree that Wikidata is "jettisoning" them. In fact, quite the contrary!

The purpose of the statement "imported from --> English Wikipedia" in the "reference" field of a Wikidata item's statement is PRECISELY to indicate to the user that this information has not been INDEPENDENTLY verified to a reliable source and that Wikipedia is NOT considered a reliable source. Furthermore, it provides a PROVENANCE of that information to help stop people from circular referencing. That is - clearly stating that the specific fact in Wikidata has come from Wikipedia helps to avoid the structured-data equivalent of "citogenisis": https://xkcd.com/978/ If/When a person can provide a reliable reference for that same fact, they are encouraged to add an actual reference. Note, the wikidata statement used for facts coming in from Wikipedia use the property "imported from". This is deliberately different from the property "reference URL" which is what you would use when adding an actual reference to a third-party reliable online source.

Furthermore, the fact that many statements in Wikidata are not given a reference (yet) is not necessarily a "problem". For example - this https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21481859 is a Wikidata item for a scientific publication with 2891 co-authors!! This is an extreme example, but it demonstrates my point... None of those 2891 statements has a specific reference listed for it, because all of them are self-evidently referenced to the scientific publication itself. The same is true of the other properties applied to this item (volume, publication date, title, page number...). All of these could be "referenced" to the very first property in the Wikidata item - the DOI of the scientific article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 This item is not "less reliable" because it doesn't have the same footnote repeated almost three thousand times, but if you merely look at statistics of "unreferenced wikidata statements" it would APPEAR that it is very poorly cited. So, I think we need a more nuanced view of what "proper referencing" means in the context of Wikidata.

-Liam

wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 1:47 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:

Disclaimer first - I'm not exactly conversant in the intricacies of WikiData, if I was to take the information on 14th Dalai Lama

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Dalai_Lama

it links to Wikidata at

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17293

the en article has 2 references that list his date of birth, the WikiData item has two references for the same piece of information WikiData source;

1. just says imported from Russian language Wikipedia, which links to

Wikidata page on the Russian Wikipedia not to the source url nor does it link to permanent url so as a source its meaningless, while may just be the result of who did the data import linking to Russian language Wikipedia is kind of obscure for a source, I can understand a tibetan, mandarin, or cantonese language source as they would be associated with the region 2. Integrated Authority File links to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q36578 on WikiData it doesnt provide a url or any other information which enables someone to verify what is said

Despite two reference the data itself appears to be immediately untraceable to a reliable source.

The circular reference of Wikidata to a Wikipedia of any language is ok but the link should be traceable to a specific article version which would then make it possible to verify the data even if the current data on Wikipedia is changed after its imported, that in itself shouldnt be difficult to engineer. If that was the case then to me a Wikipedia reference for all data is a reasonable minimum standard to start at

Would it not make more sense to import (and verify!) the reliable source cited in the relevant Wikipedia version, along with the statement?

Yes I agree. I think most of the discussion here has to do with people conflating the concept of text as in Wikipedia sentences and the concept of data as in Wikidata statements. When a user adds an image from Commons on Wikipedia, the source of the image is generally not added to Wikipedia, and I have never heard anyone complain about that except for image donors who wished that their images *were* attributed when used on Wikipedia. The same is true when Wikipedians add Wikidata statements from an item on Wikipedia. A date statement in Wikidata for a painting may be indirectly referenced in the item in another statement (the collection statement, or a "described at url" statement). This is also true of the way the date field in the Commons artwork template is used.

It is just as undesirable to clutter Wikipedia with a reference for such a date from Wikidata as it is to reference the source of the file image when including images, and so there will generally not be a reference for the pulled date in the Wikidata infobox, because the user can always look up the item for more information. Most paintings included on Wikipedia, with or without infoboxes, do not reference the date field specifically - either to the Commons image or to the article. When they do, this is often in cases where the date has been disputed. Our goal is not to reference everything, but to reference the things that need referencing.

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:

On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

The Wikimedia movement has always had an important principle: that all content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the first decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.

Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to

people

...

that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and that there is no guarantee of reliability or fitness for use.

Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.

Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata...

<snip>

I agree that "reliable source" referencing and "crowdsourced content" are indeed principles of our movement. However, I disagree that Wikidata is "jettisoning" them. In fact, quite the contrary!

The purpose of the statement "imported from --> English Wikipedia" in the "reference" field of a Wikidata item's statement is PRECISELY to indicate to the user that this information has not been INDEPENDENTLY verified to a reliable source and that Wikipedia is NOT considered a reliable source. Furthermore, it provides a PROVENANCE of that information to help stop people from circular referencing. That is - clearly stating that the specific fact in Wikidata has come from Wikipedia helps to avoid the structured-data equivalent of "citogenisis": https://xkcd.com/978/ If/When a person can provide a reliable reference for that same fact, they are encouraged to add an actual reference. Note, the wikidata statement used for facts coming in from Wikipedia use the property "imported from". This is deliberately different from the property "reference URL" which is what you would use when adding an actual reference to a third-party reliable online source.

Furthermore, the fact that many statements in Wikidata are not given a reference (yet) is not necessarily a "problem". For example - this https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21481859 is a Wikidata item for a scientific publication with 2891 co-authors!! This is an extreme example, but it demonstrates my point... None of those 2891 statements has a specific reference listed for it, because all of them are self-evidently referenced to the scientific publication itself. The same is true of the other properties applied to this item (volume, publication date, title, page number...). All of these could be "referenced" to the very first property in the Wikidata item - the DOI of the scientific article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 This item is not "less reliable" because it doesn't have the same footnote repeated almost three thousand times, but if you merely look at statistics of "unreferenced wikidata statements" it would APPEAR that it is very poorly cited. So, I think we need a more nuanced view of what "proper referencing" means in the context of Wikidata.

-Liam

wittylama.com Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

On 27 November 2015 at 15:16, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

How does the presence of that information in Wikidata help if the Google user just gets the info in the Knowledge Graph without any indication that it comes from Wikidata? Because CC0 specifically waives the right to attribution that Wikipedia retains.[1][2] No re-user of Wikidata content is required to say where the data came from, and they typically don't.

The problem is that there aren't really any alturnatives to CC0 that do any better (since wikidata isn't really copyrightable in conventional terms). Open Data Commons Open Database License would be closest but only applies in the EU and leads to messy arguments over what counts as a substantial part

Hoi Gerard,

What I hear in email from Andreas and Liam is not as much the propagation of the error (which I am sure happens with some % of the cases), but the fact that the original source is obscured and therefore it is hard to identify and correct errors, biases, etc. Because if the source of error is obscured, that error is that much harder to find and to correct. In fact, we see this even on Wikipedia articles today (wrong dates of births sourced from publications that don't do enough fact checking is something I came across personally). It is a powerful and important principle on Wikipedia, but with content re-use it gets lost. Public domain/CC0 in combination with AI lands our content for slicing and dicing and re-arranging by others, making it something entirely new, but also detached from our process of validation and verification. I am curious to hear if people think it is a problem. It definitely worries me.

We have been looking very closely at Wikidata and the possibilities it offers. I am curious to understand more about your note on Resonator:

"As long as Wikidata does not have the power of a Reasonator, the data is just that. It does not make itself in information and consequently it is awful. When there is one thing the Wikidata engineers do not do, it is considering the use of the data and the workflows to improve the data and the quality."

Am I understanding you saying that until the data sees the light of day it will not become of high quality?

Thanks, Lila

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com

wrote:

Hoi, When a benefit is "Wikimedia specific" and thereby dismissed, you miss much of what is going on. Exactly because of this link most items are well defined as to what they are about. It is not perfect but it is good. Consequently Wikidata is able to link Wikipedia in any language to sources external to Wikipedia. This is a big improvement over linking external sources to a Wikipedia. The disambiguation of subjects is done at the Wikidata end.

You make Wikidata to be a "default reference source". Given its current state, it is a bit much. Wikidata does not have the maturity to function as such. The best pointer to this fact is that 50% of all items has two or fewer statements.

When you compare the quality of Wikipedias with what en.wp used to be you are comparing apples and oranges. The Myanmar Wikipedia is better informed on Myanmar than en.wp etc.

When you qualify a Wikipedia as fascist, it does not follow that the data is suspect. Certainly when data in a source that you so easily dismiss is typically the same, there is not much meaning in what you say from a Wikidata point of view.

I am thrilled that sources are so important to the Wikimedia movement and again, I am wondering what you hope to achieve by this pronouncement. Be realistic what is it that you want to achieve? Is quality important to you and, how do you define it and more importantly how do you want to achieve it. Have you seen the statistics on sources [1]? Then have a better look and you will find that real sources are mostly absent. Adding sources one statement at a time will not significantly improve quality because that is a numbers game and it is easier to achieve quality in a different way.

When a librarian says that many sources copy each others data and that this is a problem, the bigger problem is missed. The bigger problem is not where they agree but where they disagree. Arguably they are the statements where quality is more likely an issue. Now ask your librarian what is likely to improve Wikidata more either find Sources for the statements that differ of find Sources where the statements agree. Wikidata is not authoritative but when our community starts researching such issues both Wikidata and other sources will improve rapidly their quality. This is not to say that in the end you want both Sources where sources agree and disagree.

Then ask your librarian if there is a problem with missing data We can import data from sources and consequently be more informative or we do not import more data and people have to magically combine information that exists in many sources to get a composite view. We could see Wikidata as a place where data is combined and compared with other sources, Do tell your librarian that the process mentioned above should be iterative and it will be easily understood that comparing with just one additional source will improve the focus on likely issues even more.

PS What does your librarian think when she knows that the Dutch National Library is inclined to provide us with software so that books can be ordered at Dutch libraries from Wikidata data (and by inference from Wikipedias)?

When some see Wikidata as a source of reference, they will increasingly be served a better product. At this moment it is not good at all.

When German Wikimedians have concerns about quality.WONDERFUL but what have they done to improve things? Do they apply Wikipedia standards and how does that help?

You wonder why have "bad" data in the first place... Our data IS bad and there is not enough of it for it to be really useful. We can easily add more data and have a more useful result We can easily compare sources and ask people to concentrate on differences. However you can not tell me to add Sources to the data that I add. I will tell you to do it yourself. I am happy to improve on quality but on my terms, not yours.

You mention the propagation of errors.. How would that work. You indicate that there are not enough people to fix all the issues. With bots like Kian, we have probability in adding data. We have people add data where the software is not certain. You doubt technology but you do not know where we are, what is already done.

In short my feeling is that you do not know what you are talking about. There is real scholarship in the approach that I described, My take is in applying set theory. Kian is AI. For all I care yours is FUD.

Your notion of accountability is one of a consumer, it is not the accountability needed for a project that is immature and is not at all at a stage where you should imply that it is good enough and that quality is assured. There are domains in Wikidata that I will not touch because in my opinion it is wrong in its principles. At the same time I know that it can be fixed in time and leave it at that,

I disagree with Heather Ford and Mark Graham. As long as Wikidata does not have the power of a Reasonator, the data is just that. It does not make itself in information and consequently it is awful. When there is one thing the Wikidata engineers do not do, it is considering the use of the data and the workflows to improve the data and the quality.

The data needs to be CC-0 because it is how we ensure that everybody will be happy and willing to participate. As more participation happens as more collaboration occurs we will see Wikidata increase in the amount of data that it holds and at the same time we will see quality improve.

Yes, Wikidata could do more in the way of adding sources to data. As long as the "primary sources tool" does not add the sources it knows, what do you expect from anybody else. Thanks, GerardM

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse

On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

Gerard,

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hoi, To start of, results from the past are no indications of results in the future. It is the disclaimer insurance companies have to state in all

their

...

adverts in the Netherlands. When you continue and make it a

"theological"

...

...

issue, you lose me because I am not of this faith, far from it.

Wikidata

...

is

...

its own project and it is utterly dissimilar from Wikipedia.To start of Wikidata has been a certified success from the start. The improvement

it

...

...

brought by bringing all interwiki links together is enormous.That alone should be a pointer that Wikipedia think is not realistic.

These benefits are internal to Wikimedia and a completely separate issue from third-party re-use of Wikidata content as a default reference

source,

...

which is the issue of concern here.

To continue, people have been importing data into Wikidata from the

start.

...

...

They are the statements you know and, it was possible to import them

from

...

Wikipedia because of these interwiki links. So when you call for

sources,

...

...

it is fairly save to assume that those imports are supported by the

quality

...

of the statements of the Wikipedias

The quality of three-quarters of the 280+ Wikipedia language versions is about at the level the English Wikipedia had reached in 2002.

Even some of the larger Wikipedias have significant problems. The Kazakh Wikipedia for example is controlled by functionaries of an oppressive regime[1], and the Croatian one is reportedly[2] controlled by fascists rewriting history (unless things have improved markedly in the Croatian Wikipedia since that report, which would be news to me). The Azerbaijani Wikipedia seems to have problems as well.

The Wikimedia movement has always had an important principle: that all content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the first decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.

Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to

people

...

that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and that there is no guarantee of reliability or fitness for use.

Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.

Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata, and

Wikidata

...

content is used as a reliable source by Google, where it appears without any indication of its provenance. This is a reflection of the fact that Wikidata, unlike Wikipedia, comes with a CC0 licence. That decision was,

I

...

understand, made by Denny, who is both a Google employee and a WMF board member.

The benefit to Google is very clear: this free, unattributed content adds value to Google's search engine result pages, and improves Google's

revenue

...

(currently running at about $10 million an hour, much of it from ads).

But what is the benefit to the end user? The end user gets information of undisclosed provenance, which is presented to them as authoritative, even though it may be compromised. In what sense is that an improvement for society?

To me, the ongoing information revolution is like the 19th century industrial revolution done over. It created whole new categories of

abuse,

...

which it took a century to (partly) eliminate. But first, capitalists

had a

...

field day, and the people who were screwed were the common folk. Could we not try to learn from history?

...

and if anything, that is also where they typically fail because many assumptions at Wikipedia are plain

wrong

...

...

at Wikidata. For instance a listed building is not the organisation the building is known for. At Wikidata they each need their own item and associated statements.

Wikidata is already a success for other reasons. VIAF no longer links

to

...

...

Wikipedia but to Wikidata. The biggest benefit of this move is for

people

...

...

who are not interested in English. Because of this change VIAF links through Wikidata to all Wikipedias not only en.wp. Consequently people

may

...

find through VIAF Wikipedia articles in their own language through

their

...

...

library systems.

At the recent Wikiconference USA, a Wikimedia veteran and professional librarian expressed the view to me that

• circular referencing between VIAF and Wikidata will create a humongous

muddle that nobody will be able to sort out again afterwards, because – unlike wiki mishaps in other topic areas – here it's the most

authoritative

...

sources that are being corrupted by circular referencing;

• third parties are using Wikimedia content as a *reference standard

*when

...

that was never the intention (see above).

I've seen German Wikimedians express concerns that quality assurance standards have dropped alarmingly since the project began, with bot users mass-importing unreliable data.

...

So do not forget about Wikipedia and the lessons learned. These lessons

are

...

important to Wikipedia. However, they do not necessarily apply to

Wikidata

...

particularly when you approach Wikidata as an opportunity to do things

in a

...

different way. Set theory, a branch of mathematics, is exactly what we need. When we have data at Wikidata of a given quality.. eg 90% and we

have

...

data at another source with a given quality eg 90%, we can compare the

two

...

and find a subset where the two sources do not match. When we curate

the

...

...

differences, it is highly likely that we improve quality at Wikidata or

at

...

the other source.

This sounds like "Let's do it quick and dirty and worry about the

problems

...

later".

I sometimes get the feeling software engineers just love a programming challenge, because that's where they can hone and display their skills. Dirty data is one of those challenges: all the clever things one can do

to

...

clean up the data! There is tremendous optimism about what can be done.

But

...

why have bad data in the first place, starting with rubbish and then proving that it can be cleaned up a bit using clever software?

The effort will make the engineer look good, sure, but there will always

be

...

collateral damage as errors propagate before they are fixed. The

engineer's

...

eyes are not typically on the content, but on their software. The content their bots and programs manipulate at times seems almost incidental, something for "others" to worry about – "others" who don't necessarily exist in sufficient numbers to ensure quality.

In short, my feeling is that the engineering enthusiasm and expertise applied to Wikidata aren't balanced by a similar level of commitment to scholarship in generating the data, and getting them right first time.

We've seen where that approach can lead with Wikipedia. Wikipedia hoaxes and falsehoods find their way into the blogosphere, the media, even the academic literature. The stakes with Wikidata are potentially much

higher,

...

because I fear errors in Wikidata stand a good chance of being massively propagated by Google's present and future automated information delivery mechanisms, which are completely opaque. Most internet users aren't even aware to what extent the Google Knowledge Graph relies on anonymously compiled, crowdsourced data; they will just assume that if Google says

it,

...

it must be true.

In addition to honest mistakes, transcription errors, outdated info etc., the whole thing is a propagandist's wet dream. Anonymous accounts! Guaranteed identity protection! Plausible deniability! No legal

liability!

...

Automated import and dissemination without human oversight! Massive

impact

...

on public opinion![3]

If information is power, then this provides the best chance of a power

grab

...

humanity has seen since the invention of the newspaper. In the media landscape, you at least have right-wing, centrist and left-wing publications each presenting their version of the truth, and you know

who's

...

publishing what and what agenda they follow. You can pick and choose, compare and contrast, read between the lines. We won't have that online. Wikimedia-fuelled search engines like Google and Bing dominate the information supply.

The right to enjoy a pluralist media landscape, populated by players who are accountable to the public, was hard won in centuries past. Some countries still don't enjoy that luxury today. Are we now blithely giving it away, in the name of progress, and for the greater glory of

technocrats?

...

I don't trust the way this is going. I see a distinct possibility that we'll end up with false information in Wikidata (or, rather, the Google Knowledge Graph) being used to "correct" accurate information in other sources, just because the Google/Wikidata content is ubiquitous. If you build circular referencing loops fuelled by spurious data, you don't provide access to knowledge, you destroy it. A lie told often enough etc.

To quote Heather Ford and Mark Graham, "We know that the engineers and developers, volunteers and passionate technologists are often trying to

do

...

their best in difficult circumstances. But there need to be better

attempts

...

by people working on these platforms to explain how decisions are made about what is represented. These may just look like unimportant lines of code in some system somewhere, but they have a very real impact on the identities and futures of people who are often far removed from the conversations happening among engineers."

I agree with that. The "what" should be more important than the "how",

and

...

at present it doesn't seem to be.

It's well worth thinking about, and having a debate about what can be

done

...

to prevent the worst from happening.

In particular, I would like to see the decision to publish Wikidata

under a

...

CC0 licence revisited. The public should know where the data it gets

comes

...

from; that's a basic issue of transparency.

Andreas

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-10-07/Op-ed

...

[2]

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/croatian-wikipedia-fascist-takeover-controv...

...

[3]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016...

...

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Hoi,

Sources are important. When we do not have data at Wikidata and we add it from anywhere, we have the basis to do some good. At this time we do not really add source information. It is too cumbersome and as long as the "primary sources tool", an "official" tool does not do it, why bother?

My point about sources is very much that when one source does not agree, there is a likely quality issue. When five sources agree, there is nothing that marks them as suspect and there is no reason why I would look for a Source for that statement anytime soon. When you work on quality, you do not care about sources that agree, you care about those that do not. When multiple sources copied each others data, it means that they all provide information. That is superior to wave hands, not being informative and not include missing data because of a lack of a Source

We have to ask ourselves, what is our aim. To share in the sum of all knowledge and occasionally be wrong or keeping a lot of knowledge from the people and pretend that it is all correct Thanks, GerardM

PS we are wiki based.

On 27 November 2015 at 20:14, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hoi Gerard,

What I hear in email from Andreas and Liam is not as much the propagation of the error (which I am sure happens with some % of the cases), but the fact that the original source is obscured and therefore it is hard to identify and correct errors, biases, etc. Because if the source of error is obscured, that error is that much harder to find and to correct. In fact, we see this even on Wikipedia articles today (wrong dates of births sourced from publications that don't do enough fact checking is something I came across personally). It is a powerful and important principle on Wikipedia, but with content re-use it gets lost. Public domain/CC0 in combination with AI lands our content for slicing and dicing and re-arranging by others, making it something entirely new, but also detached from our process of validation and verification. I am curious to hear if people think it is a problem. It definitely worries me.

We have been looking very closely at Wikidata and the possibilities it offers. I am curious to understand more about your note on Resonator:

"As long as Wikidata does not have the power of a Reasonator, the data is just that. It does not make itself in information and consequently it is awful. When there is one thing the Wikidata engineers do not do, it is considering the use of the data and the workflows to improve the data and the quality."

Am I understanding you saying that until the data sees the light of day it will not become of high quality?

Thanks, Lila

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com

...

wrote:

...

Hoi, When a benefit is "Wikimedia specific" and thereby dismissed, you miss

much

...

of what is going on. Exactly because of this link most items are well defined as to what they are about. It is not perfect but it is good. Consequently Wikidata is able to link Wikipedia in any language to

sources

...

external to Wikipedia. This is a big improvement over linking external sources to a Wikipedia. The disambiguation of subjects is done at the Wikidata end.

You make Wikidata to be a "default reference source". Given its current state, it is a bit much. Wikidata does not have the maturity to function

as

...

such. The best pointer to this fact is that 50% of all items has two or fewer statements.

When you compare the quality of Wikipedias with what en.wp used to be you are comparing apples and oranges. The Myanmar Wikipedia is better

informed

...

on Myanmar than en.wp etc.

When you qualify a Wikipedia as fascist, it does not follow that the data is suspect. Certainly when data in a source that you so easily dismiss is typically the same, there is not much meaning in what you say from a Wikidata point of view.

I am thrilled that sources are so important to the Wikimedia movement and again, I am wondering what you hope to achieve by this pronouncement. Be realistic what is it that you want to achieve? Is quality important to

you

...

and, how do you define it and more importantly how do you want to achieve it. Have you seen the statistics on sources [1]? Then have a better look and you will find that real sources are mostly absent. Adding sources one statement at a time will not significantly improve quality because that

is

...

a numbers game and it is easier to achieve quality in a different way.

When a librarian says that many sources copy each others data and that

this

...

is a problem, the bigger problem is missed. The bigger problem is not

where

...

they agree but where they disagree. Arguably they are the statements

where

...

quality is more likely an issue. Now ask your librarian what is likely to improve Wikidata more either find Sources for the statements that differ

of

...

find Sources where the statements agree. Wikidata is not authoritative

but

...

when our community starts researching such issues both Wikidata and other sources will improve rapidly their quality. This is not to say that in

the

...

end you want both Sources where sources agree and disagree.

Then ask your librarian if there is a problem with missing data We can import data from sources and consequently be more informative or we do

not

...

import more data and people have to magically combine information that exists in many sources to get a composite view. We could see Wikidata as

a

...

place where data is combined and compared with other sources, Do tell

your

...

librarian that the process mentioned above should be iterative and it

will

...

be easily understood that comparing with just one additional source will improve the focus on likely issues even more.

PS What does your librarian think when she knows that the Dutch National Library is inclined to provide us with software so that books can be ordered at Dutch libraries from Wikidata data (and by inference from Wikipedias)?

When some see Wikidata as a source of reference, they will increasingly

be

...

served a better product. At this moment it is not good at all.

When German Wikimedians have concerns about quality.WONDERFUL but what

have

...

they done to improve things? Do they apply Wikipedia standards and how

does

...

that help?

You wonder why have "bad" data in the first place... Our data IS bad and there is not enough of it for it to be really useful. We can easily add more data and have a more useful result We can easily compare sources and ask people to concentrate on differences. However you can not tell me to add Sources to the data that I add. I will tell you to do it yourself. I

am

...

happy to improve on quality but on my terms, not yours.

You mention the propagation of errors.. How would that work. You indicate that there are not enough people to fix all the issues. With bots like Kian, we have probability in adding data. We have people add data where

the

...

software is not certain. You doubt technology but you do not know where

we

...

are, what is already done.

In short my feeling is that you do not know what you are talking about. There is real scholarship in the approach that I described, My take is in applying set theory. Kian is AI. For all I care yours is FUD.

Your notion of accountability is one of a consumer, it is not the accountability needed for a project that is immature and is not at all

at a

...

stage where you should imply that it is good enough and that quality is assured. There are domains in Wikidata that I will not touch because in

my

...

opinion it is wrong in its principles. At the same time I know that it

can

...

be fixed in time and leave it at that,

I disagree with Heather Ford and Mark Graham. As long as Wikidata does

not

...

have the power of a Reasonator, the data is just that. It does not make itself in information and consequently it is awful. When there is one

thing

...

the Wikidata engineers do not do, it is considering the use of the data

and

...

the workflows to improve the data and the quality.

The data needs to be CC-0 because it is how we ensure that everybody will be happy and willing to participate. As more participation happens as

more

...

collaboration occurs we will see Wikidata increase in the amount of data that it holds and at the same time we will see quality improve.

Yes, Wikidata could do more in the way of adding sources to data. As long as the "primary sources tool" does not add the sources it knows, what do you expect from anybody else. Thanks, GerardM

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php?reverse

On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

Gerard,

On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 7:15 AM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hoi, To start of, results from the past are no indications of results in

the

...

...

...

future. It is the disclaimer insurance companies have to state in all

their

...

adverts in the Netherlands. When you continue and make it a

"theological"

...

...

issue, you lose me because I am not of this faith, far from it.

Wikidata

...

is

...

its own project and it is utterly dissimilar from Wikipedia.To start

of

...

...

...

Wikidata has been a certified success from the start. The improvement

it

...

...

brought by bringing all interwiki links together is enormous.That

alone

...

...

...

should be a pointer that Wikipedia think is not realistic.

These benefits are internal to Wikimedia and a completely separate

issue

...

...

from third-party re-use of Wikidata content as a default reference

source,

...

which is the issue of concern here.

To continue, people have been importing data into Wikidata from the

start.

...

...

They are the statements you know and, it was possible to import them

from

...

Wikipedia because of these interwiki links. So when you call for

sources,

...

...

it is fairly save to assume that those imports are supported by the

quality

...

of the statements of the Wikipedias

The quality of three-quarters of the 280+ Wikipedia language versions

is

...

...

about at the level the English Wikipedia had reached in 2002.

Even some of the larger Wikipedias have significant problems. The

Kazakh

...

...

Wikipedia for example is controlled by functionaries of an oppressive regime[1], and the Croatian one is reportedly[2] controlled by fascists rewriting history (unless things have improved markedly in the Croatian Wikipedia since that report, which would be news to me). The

Azerbaijani

...

...

Wikipedia seems to have problems as well.

The Wikimedia movement has always had an important principle: that all content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the

first

...

...

decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.

Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to

people

...

that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and that there is no

guarantee

...

...

of reliability or fitness for use.

Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.

Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata, and

Wikidata

...

content is used as a reliable source by Google, where it appears

without

...

...

any indication of its provenance. This is a reflection of the fact that Wikidata, unlike Wikipedia, comes with a CC0 licence. That decision

was,

...

I

...

understand, made by Denny, who is both a Google employee and a WMF

board

...

...

member.

The benefit to Google is very clear: this free, unattributed content

adds

...

...

value to Google's search engine result pages, and improves Google's

revenue

...

(currently running at about $10 million an hour, much of it from ads).

But what is the benefit to the end user? The end user gets information

of

...

...

undisclosed provenance, which is presented to them as authoritative,

even

...

...

though it may be compromised. In what sense is that an improvement for society?

To me, the ongoing information revolution is like the 19th century industrial revolution done over. It created whole new categories of

abuse,

...

which it took a century to (partly) eliminate. But first, capitalists

had a

...

field day, and the people who were screwed were the common folk. Could

we

...

...

not try to learn from history?

...

and if anything, that is also where they typically fail because many assumptions at Wikipedia are plain

wrong

...

...

at Wikidata. For instance a listed building is not the organisation

the

...

...

...

building is known for. At Wikidata they each need their own item and associated statements.

Wikidata is already a success for other reasons. VIAF no longer links

to

...

...

Wikipedia but to Wikidata. The biggest benefit of this move is for

people

...

...

who are not interested in English. Because of this change VIAF links through Wikidata to all Wikipedias not only en.wp. Consequently

people

...

...

may

...

find through VIAF Wikipedia articles in their own language through

their

...

...

library systems.

At the recent Wikiconference USA, a Wikimedia veteran and professional librarian expressed the view to me that

• circular referencing between VIAF and Wikidata will create a

humongous

...

...

muddle that nobody will be able to sort out again afterwards, because – unlike wiki mishaps in other topic areas – here it's the most

authoritative

...

sources that are being corrupted by circular referencing;

• third parties are using Wikimedia content as a *reference standard

*when

...

that was never the intention (see above).

I've seen German Wikimedians express concerns that quality assurance standards have dropped alarmingly since the project began, with bot

users

...

...

mass-importing unreliable data.

...

So do not forget about Wikipedia and the lessons learned. These

lessons

...

...

are

...

important to Wikipedia. However, they do not necessarily apply to

Wikidata

...

particularly when you approach Wikidata as an opportunity to do

things

...

...

in a

...

different way. Set theory, a branch of mathematics, is exactly what

we

...

...

...

need. When we have data at Wikidata of a given quality.. eg 90% and

we

...

...

have

...

data at another source with a given quality eg 90%, we can compare

the

...

...

two

...

and find a subset where the two sources do not match. When we curate

the

...

...

differences, it is highly likely that we improve quality at Wikidata

or

...

...

at

...

the other source.

This sounds like "Let's do it quick and dirty and worry about the

problems

...

later".

I sometimes get the feeling software engineers just love a programming challenge, because that's where they can hone and display their skills. Dirty data is one of those challenges: all the clever things one can do

to

...

clean up the data! There is tremendous optimism about what can be done.

But

...

why have bad data in the first place, starting with rubbish and then proving that it can be cleaned up a bit using clever software?

The effort will make the engineer look good, sure, but there will

always

...

be

...

collateral damage as errors propagate before they are fixed. The

engineer's

...

eyes are not typically on the content, but on their software. The

content

...

...

their bots and programs manipulate at times seems almost incidental, something for "others" to worry about – "others" who don't necessarily exist in sufficient numbers to ensure quality.

In short, my feeling is that the engineering enthusiasm and expertise applied to Wikidata aren't balanced by a similar level of commitment to scholarship in generating the data, and getting them right first time.

We've seen where that approach can lead with Wikipedia. Wikipedia

hoaxes

...

...

and falsehoods find their way into the blogosphere, the media, even the academic literature. The stakes with Wikidata are potentially much

higher,

...

because I fear errors in Wikidata stand a good chance of being

massively

...

...

propagated by Google's present and future automated information

delivery

...

...

mechanisms, which are completely opaque. Most internet users aren't

even

...

...

aware to what extent the Google Knowledge Graph relies on anonymously compiled, crowdsourced data; they will just assume that if Google says

it,

...

it must be true.

In addition to honest mistakes, transcription errors, outdated info

etc.,

...

...

the whole thing is a propagandist's wet dream. Anonymous accounts! Guaranteed identity protection! Plausible deniability! No legal

liability!

...

Automated import and dissemination without human oversight! Massive

impact

...

on public opinion![3]

If information is power, then this provides the best chance of a power

grab

...

humanity has seen since the invention of the newspaper. In the media landscape, you at least have right-wing, centrist and left-wing publications each presenting their version of the truth, and you know

who's

...

publishing what and what agenda they follow. You can pick and choose, compare and contrast, read between the lines. We won't have that

online.

...

...

Wikimedia-fuelled search engines like Google and Bing dominate the information supply.

The right to enjoy a pluralist media landscape, populated by players

who

...

...

are accountable to the public, was hard won in centuries past. Some countries still don't enjoy that luxury today. Are we now blithely

giving

...

...

it away, in the name of progress, and for the greater glory of

technocrats?

...

I don't trust the way this is going. I see a distinct possibility that we'll end up with false information in Wikidata (or, rather, the Google Knowledge Graph) being used to "correct" accurate information in other sources, just because the Google/Wikidata content is ubiquitous. If you build circular referencing loops fuelled by spurious data, you don't provide access to knowledge, you destroy it. A lie told often enough

etc.

...

...

To quote Heather Ford and Mark Graham, "We know that the engineers and developers, volunteers and passionate technologists are often trying to

do

...

their best in difficult circumstances. But there need to be better

attempts

...

by people working on these platforms to explain how decisions are made about what is represented. These may just look like unimportant lines

of

...

...

code in some system somewhere, but they have a very real impact on the identities and futures of people who are often far removed from the conversations happening among engineers."

I agree with that. The "what" should be more important than the "how",

and

...

at present it doesn't seem to be.

It's well worth thinking about, and having a debate about what can be

done

...

to prevent the worst from happening.

In particular, I would like to see the decision to publish Wikidata

under a

...

CC0 licence revisited. The public should know where the data it gets

comes

...

from; that's a basic issue of transparency.

Andreas

[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-10-07/Op-ed

...

...

[2]

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/croatian-wikipedia-fascist-takeover-controv...

...

...

[3]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016...

...

...

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Gergo, do you mind if people continue discussing this? I'm finding it very interesting and fruitful. I hadn't thought through these issues before, and there are likely to be others on this list who haven't either.

Best! ,Wil

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

What I hear in email from Andreas and Liam is not as much the propagation of the error (which I am sure happens with some % of the cases), but the fact that the original source is obscured and therefore it is hard to identify and correct errors, biases, etc. Because if the source of error is obscured, that error is that much harder to find and to correct. In fact, we see this even on Wikipedia articles today (wrong dates of births sourced from publications that don't do enough fact checking is something I came across personally). It is a powerful and important principle on Wikipedia, but with content re-use it gets lost. Public domain/CC0 in combination with AI lands our content for slicing and dicing and re-arranging by others, making it something entirely new, but also detached from our process of validation and verification. I am curious to hear if people think it is a problem. It definitely worries me.

This conversation seems to have morphed into trying to solve some problems that we are speculating Google might have (no one here actually *knows* how the Knowledge Graph works, of course; maybe it's sensitive to manipulation of Wikidata claims, maybe not). That seems like an entirely fruitless line of discourse to me; if the problem exists, it is Google's problem to solve (since they are the ones in a position to tell if it's a real problem or not; not to mention they have two or three magnitudes more resources to throw at it than the Wikimedia movement would). Trying to make our content less free for fear that someone might misuse it is a shamefully wrong frame of mind for and organization that's supposed to be a leader of the open content movement, IMO. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:17 AM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:

Trying to make our content less free for fear that someone might misuse it is a shamefully wrong frame of mind for and organization that's supposed to be a leader of the open content movement, IMO.

Do you think there is something "shameful" about Wikipedia using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License?

And if that isn't shameful, why would it be shameful if Wikidata used the same licence?

Attribution has a dual benefit:

1. It provides visibility for Wikimedia and the open content movement. 2. The public can see where the data comes from.

What is shameful about that?

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com wrote:

("Shameful" was an unnecessarily confrontational choice of word; I apologize.)

Thanks.

There is also the practical matter of facts not being copyrightable in the US, and non-zero CC licenses not being particularly useful for databases (what you want is something like the GPL Affero for databases and CC does not have such a license).

That hasn't stopped DBpedia and other open-content databases (the Paleobiology database for example[1]) from using CC licenses requiring attribution.

DBpedia arguably had to, because its database is derived from Wikipedia, which has an attribution required, share-alike license: "DBpedia is derived from Wikipedia and is distributed under the same licensing terms as Wikipedia itself."[2]

To the extent that Wikidata draws on Wikipedia, its CC0 license would appear to be a gross violation of Wikipedia's share-alike license requirement.

The generation of data always has a social context. Knowing where data come from is a good thing.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/41216 [2] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 5:23 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

To the extent that Wikidata draws on Wikipedia, its CC0 license would appear to be a gross violation of Wikipedia's share-alike license requirement.

By the same logic, to the extent Wikipedia takes its facts from non-free external source, its free license would be a copyright violation. Luckily for us, that's not how copyright works. Statements of facts can not be copyrighted; large-scale arrangements of facts (ie. a full database) probably can, but CC does not prevent others from using them without attribution, just distributing them (again, it's like the GPL/Affero difference); there are sui generis database rights in some countries but not in the USA where both Wikipedia and most proprietary reusers/compatitors are located, so relying on neighbouring rights would not help there but cause legal uncertainty for reusers (e.g. OSM which has lots of legal trouble importing coordinates due to being EU-based).

The generation of data always has a social context. Knowing where data come

from is a good thing.

You probably won't find any Wikipedian who disagrees; verifiability is one of the fundaments of the project. But something being good and using restrictive licensing to force others to do it are very different things.

Hoi, It would be a gross violation of trust to bring Wikidata under a different license. When an external source is willing to share its data, it can do so. With explicit agreement we can copy data in from them in this way. Even when this is not possible for whatever reason, we can still contribute because we can compare data and on the basis of differences in existing data curate our data and enable them to share our findings.

I am amused by your fear for manipulation. Yes, data can be manipulated but once we see it happen, we can take measures when it affects the data we hold. Provenance of data is at this stage something we at Wikidata wish for. Arguably it does not make sense to make it a priority for all of our data because it would stifle Wikidata and it is utterly against the wiki spirit.

The best way to guard against manipulation is to cooperate widely and take any difference in data as serious. It is in the differences where we want to know why the differences and why they exist. Focussing on known issues helps us identify systemic issues and when we do we can expose such manipulation with proof. In this way we are using a SMART methodology. No I would never use the license as a weapon, it is how manipulation is justified.

Importing data from Wikipedia is a sensible thing to do. Its data is relatively well known for its quality. It has its issues but its basis is NPOV. When people are alarmed about importing from Wikipedia, it tells us more of what they think of the quality of Wikipedia than of the quality of Wikidata. When people are alarmed because they cannot control it, ask yourself what is their problem and how do their arguments enable the notion of Wikidata as a wiki? When imported data is wrong, there are tools to remove content quite delicately. So identify an issue and it can be dealt with.

When you argue that Wikidata cannot be used as a central storage. Fine, do not use it. In the mean time quality of specific sets of data is of higher quality than any Wikipedia. This is a proven fact. The question if Wikidata is useful as a central datarepository at this time can only be answered as NO when it means it is about all of Wikidata. When it is about specific subsets of data the answer is clearly yes. It is also obvious that as time goes on more subsets of data will be of a higher quality than any Wikipedia (when thinking in terms of sets of data - there will always items where a Wikipedia has an edge).

FYI I am in contact with a German university that is likely to use Wikidata internally for its research data. It needs Reasonator type of functionality to make it useful. It wants to share its data with Wikidata and wants two way RSS feeds in order to include new information

When we set up cooperatation with statistical offices, we CAN attribute easily by having bots import data on their behalf using THEIR user id and adding sources to the new data. We can also provide data from their website in applications.. It is not the license that means anything it is what we agree to do. When we have sourced data in this way, you are silly to change it. False attributions are not permitted under any license.

When we are afraid about a Seigenthaler type of event based on Wikidata, rest assured there is plenty wrong in either Wikipedia or Wikidata tha makes it possible for it to happen. The most important thing is to deal with it responsibly. Just being afraid will not help us in any way. Yes we need quality and quantity. As long as we make a best effort to improve our data, we will do well.

As to the Wikipedian is residence, that is his opinion. At the same time the article on ebola has been very important. It may not be science but it certainly encyclopaedic. At the same time this Wikipedian in residence is involved, makes a positive contribution and while he may make mistakes he is part of the solution.

I am happy that you propose that work is to be done. What have you done but more importantly what are you going to do? For me there is "Number of edits: 2,088,923" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/GerardM Thanks, GerardM

On 29 November 2015 at 15:10, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

Gergo,

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 12:36 AM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

By the same logic, to the extent Wikipedia takes its facts from non-free external source, its free license would be a copyright violation. Luckily for us, that's not how copyright works.

I'm aware that facts are not copyrightable. By the same logic, Wikidata being offered under a CC BY-SA license, say, would not prevent anyone from extracting facts -- knowledge -- from it, and it would enable Wikidata to import a lot of data it presently cannot, because of licence incompatibilities.

...

Statements of facts can not be copyrighted; large-scale arrangements of facts (ie. a full database) probably can, but CC does not prevent others from using them without attribution, just distributing them (again, it's like the GPL/Affero difference);

Distribution is the issue here – large-scale distribution and viral propagation of data with a well-documented potential for manipulation and error, in a way that makes the provenance of these data a closed book to the end user.

Do you accept that this is a potential problem, and if so, how would you guard against it, if not through the licence?

...

there are sui generis database rights in some countries but not in the USA where both Wikipedia and most proprietary reusers/compatitors are located, so relying on neighbouring rights would not help there but cause legal uncertainty for reusers (e.g. OSM which

has

...

lots of legal trouble importing coordinates due to being EU-based).

It seems noteworthy that Freebase specifically said, with regard to loading structured data, "If a data source is under CC-BY, you can load it into Freebase as long as you provide attribution."[1]

Wikidata practice seems to have taken a different path regarding licence compatibility, given its systematic imports from Wikipedia.

Interestingly enough, it's been pointed out to me that Denny said in 2012,[2]

---o0o---

Alexrk2, it is true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will *provide* data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding? --Denny Vrandečić (WMDE) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Denny_Vrande%C4%8Di%C4%87_(WMDE) ( talk < https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Denny_Vrande%C4%8Di%C4%87_(WMDE)

...

)

12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

---o0o---

The key sentence here is "Wikidata does not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all."

That doesn't seem to be how things have turned out, because today we have people on Wikidata raising alarms about mass imports from Wikipedia:[3]

---o0o---

Reliable Bot imports from wikipedias?

In a Wikipedia discussion I came by chance across a link to the following discussion:

• Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/10#STOP_with_bot_import

< https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/10#STOP_wit...

...

[...] To provide an outside perspective as Wikipedian (and a potential use[r] of WD in the future). I wholeheartedly agree with Snipre, in fact "bots [ar]e running wild" and the uncontrolled import of data/information from Wikipedias is one of the main reasons for some Wikipedias developing an increasingly hostile attitude towards WD and its usage in Wikipedias. *If* WD is ever to function as a central data storage for various Wikimedia projects and in particular Wikipedia as well (in analogy to Commons), *then* quality has to take the driver's seat over quantity. A central storage needs a much better data integrity than the projects using it, because one mistake in its data will multiply throughout the projects relying on WD, which may cause all sorts of problems. For crude comparison think of a virus placed on a central server than on a single client.The consequences are much more severe and nobody in their right mind would run the server with even less protection/restrictions than the client.

Another thin[g] is, that if you envision users of other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or even 3rd party external projects to eventually help with data maintenance when they start using WD, then you might find them rather unwilling to do so, if not enough attention is paid to quality, instead they probably just dump WD from their projects.

In general all the advantages of the central data storage depend on the quality (reliability) of data. If that is not given to reasonable high degree, there is no point to have central data storage at all. All the great application become useless if they operate on false data.--Kmhkmh < https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Kmhkmh&action=edit&r...

...

(talk https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:Kmhkmh) 12:00, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

---o0o---

(I was unaware of that post by Kmhkmh when I started contributing to this discussion, but it obviously echoes some of my own concerns.)

I've been told on the German Wikipedia that the Wikidata CC0 licence has long been a controversial issue, subject to recurrent discussion, especially with regard to official population statistics in Europe, whose publishers often require attribution, making their wholesale import in Wikidata's CC0 environment problematic.[4]

In reviewing these discussions, I couldn't help but be reminded of Flickrwashing schemes by some contributors' lines of thought: how -- via which intermediary steps -- can we get the info into our CC0 project without being seen to fall foul of the original publishers' licenses?

As I understand it, the intent is to bully other data publishers into making their data available under CC0 as well. I understand this from an open-content perspective, and I can see how it might benefit Google's and other information platforms' bottom line, but I reiterate -- there are very, very significant downsides to having a central database subject to anonymous manipulation by all comers whose data is automatically propagated by major search engines. There are many autocratic regimes in the world today who spend a lot of money and effort to achieve this kind of uniform media response in their countries.

In my opinion, it creates a significant vulnerability in the global information infrastructure. If, in more troubled times ahead, people are fed the same unattributed lie by all major online outlets, because they are all automatically propagating the content of Wikimedia's CC0 database, then this could potentially alter the course of history, and not in a good way.

I am happy to hear ideas about how to address this that do not involve licensing. We need more transparency about data provenance.

You may argue that Wikidata is still in its early days, and has nowhere near the amount of data, nowhere near the reach and impact today to justify such an effort. Maybe it never will, and I'm worrying for nothing.

But we thought much the same about Wikipedia around the time of the Seigenthaler incident. Before we knew it, Wikipedia had become the world's dominant information resource, with increasing numbers of government officials, judges, journalists and academics happy to accept its word uncritically – in a way that horrifies most Wikipedians, who are well aware of the system's weaknesses.

Last month for example the Wikipedian in Residence at NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) said on Wikidata that he would "cringe" at the thought of using Wikipedia as a source and personally refrained from it:[5]

---o0o---

• As a note, I do semi-automated edits on my work account

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:James_Hare_(NIOSH), and I plan on doing some as a volunteer as well. I don't use Wikipedia as a source (as a Wikipedian of 11 years, I cringe at the thought ;), but if any batch edits I do manage to screw something up despite my meticulous planning, please let me know immediately. I will take responsibility for my own messes. Harej https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Harej (talk https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User_talk:Harej) 17:38, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

---o0o---

If Wikidata were to acquire the global reach its makers and sponsors hope for, then we would have done well to build a robust system that minimises harm, and cannot become a victim of its own success. I propose that there is work to be done here.

Coming back briefly to the legal licensing situation, it seems to be fairly complex even in the US, according to the relevant Wikilegal page on Meta[6], with much depending on the amount of material extracted, as you pointed out above.

Things are more complicated still in the EU, given that European law protects databases created by EU citizens or residents (which includes a good number of Wikimedians), with that protection extending to "sweat of the brow" (unprotected in the US). EU law even prohibits the "repeated and systematic extraction" of "insubstantial parts of the contents" of a database (where the term "database" is defined broadly enough to include a Wikipedia).

There's not much point in my saying more about the legal aspects of licensing; even the advice from the Foundation's legal professionals says it's rarely easy to predict how a court might rule under either EU or US law.[6]

Andreas

[1] http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/License_compatibility [2]

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikidata#Is_CC_the_right_license_for_da... [3]

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Reliable_Bot_imports_fro... [4] https://www.mail-archive.com/wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg00178.html

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:General_disclaimer&d... http://osdir.com/ml/general/2012-11/msg31088.html http://www.mail-archive.com/wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org/msg03088.html

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2014/04#Modifyin...

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2014/04#Data_rel...

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team/Archive/... http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/450291#450291

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2014/05#Populati...

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2014/04#Data_own...

[5]

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Project_chat&diff=pr...

[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Hoi, <grin> I do work on quality issues. I blog about them. I work towards implementing solutions. </grin> I have fixed quite a few errors in Wikidata and I do not rack up as many edits as I could because of it.

In the mean time with your "I do not want to be involved attitude" you are the proverbial sailor who stays on shore. It is your option to get your hands dirty or not. However, a friend of mine mentioned this attitude and compared it to the people who said that Wikipedia would never work. That is fine so I will just move on away from many of your arguments..

I do not care about profit. I have over 2 million edits on Wikidata alone and I have a few others on other projects as well. They may, it is implicit in the license make a profit. The point is that as more data is freed, it will free more data. With more free data we can inform more people. We can share more of the sum of all available knowledge.

I wonder, there are many ways in which quality can be improved and all you do is refer to others. Why should I bother with your arguments when they are not yours and when you do not show how to make a difference? My arguments are plausible and I actively work towards getting them implemented. I do not need to convince people to do my work. The only thing I want to do is ask people for their support so that we get sooner to the stage where we will share in the sum of all available knowledge, something we do not really do at this stage. Thanks, GerardM

On 1 December 2015 at 15:30, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:

...

So identify an issue and it can be dealt with.

The fact an issue *can* be dealt with does not mean that it *will* be dealt with.

For example, in the post that opened this discussion a little over a week ago, you said:

"At Wikidata we often find issues with data imported from a Wikipedia. Lists have been produced with these issues on the Wikipedia involved and arguably they do present issues with the quality of Wikipedia or Wikidata for that matter. So far hardly anything resulted from such outreach."

These were your own words: "hardly anything resulted from such outreach." Wikimedia is three years into this project. If people produce lists of quality issues, that's great, but if nothing happens as a result, that's not so great.

An example of this is available in this very thread. Three days ago I mentioned the issues with the Grasulf II of Friuli entries on Reasonator and Wikidata. I didn't expect that you or anyone else would fix them, and they haven't been, at the time of writing.

You certainly could have fixed them -- you have made hundreds of edits on Wikidata since replying to that post of mine -- but you haven't. Adding new data is more satisfying than sourcing and improving an obscure entry. (If you're wondering why I didn't fix the entry myself, see the section "And to answer the obvious question …" in last month's Signpost op-ed.[1])

This problem is replicated across the Wikimedia universe. Wikimedia projects are run by volunteers. They work on what interests them, or whatever they have an investment in. Fixing old errors is not as appealing as importing 2 million items of new data (including tens or hundreds of thousands of erroneous ones), because fixing errors is slow work. It retards the growth of your edit count! You spend one hour researching a date, and all you get for that effort is one lousy edit in your contributions history. There are plenty of tasks allowing you to rack up 500 edits in 5 minutes. People seem to prefer those.

That is why Wikipedia has the familiar backlogs in areas like copyright infringement or AfC. Even warning templates indicating bias or other problematic content often sit for years without being addressed.

There is a systemic mismatch between data creation and data curation. There is a lot of energy for the former, and very little energy for the latter. That is why initiatives like the one started by WMF board member James Heilman and others, to have the English Wikipedia's medical articles peer-reviewed, are so important. They are small steps in the right direction.

...

When we are afraid about a Seigenthaler type of event based on Wikidata, rest assured there is plenty wrong in either Wikipedia or Wikidata tha makes it possible for it to happen. The most important thing is to deal with it responsibly. Just being afraid will not help us in any way. Yes

we

...

need quality and quantity. As long as we make a best effort to improve

our

...

data, we will do well.

That's "eventualism". "Quality is terrible, but eventually it will be great, because ... we're all trying, and it's a wiki!" To me that sounds more like religious faith or magical thinking than empirical science.

Things being on a wiki does not guarantee quality; far from it.[2][3][4][5]

...

As to the Wikipedian is residence, that is his opinion. At the same time the article on ebola has been very important. It may not be science but

it

...

certainly encyclopaedic. At the same time this Wikipedian in residence is involved, makes a positive contribution and while he may make mistakes he is part of the solution.

I am happy that you propose that work is to be done. What have you done

but

...

more importantly what are you going to do? For me there is "Number of edits: 2,088,923" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/GerardM

I will do what I can to encourage Wikimedia Foundation board members and management to review the situation, in consultation with outside academics like those at the Oxford Internet Institute who are concerned about present developments, and to consider whether more stringent sourcing policies are required for Wikidata in order to assure the quality and traceability of data in the Wikidata corpus.

The public is the most important stakeholder in this, and should be informed and involved. If there are quality issues, the Wikimedia Foundation should be completely transparent about them in its public communications, neither minimising nor exaggerating the issues. Known problems and potential issues should be publicised as widely as possible in order to minimise the harm to society resulting from uncritical reuse of faulty data.

I have started to reach out to scholars and journalists, inviting them to review this thread as well as related materials, and form their own conclusions. I may write an op-ed about it in the Signpost, because I believe it's an important issue that deserves wider attention and debate.

As far as my own contributions are concerned, I am more inclined to boycott Wikidata.

Apart from all the issues discussed over the past few days, there is another aspect to my reluctance to contribute to Wikidata.

The Knowledge Graph is a major new Google feature. It adds value to Google's search engine results pages. It stops people from clicking through to other sources, including Wikipedia. The recent downturn in Wikipedia pageviews has been widely linked to the Knowledge Graph.

By ensuring that more people visit Google's ad-filled pages, and stay on them rather than clicking through to other sites, the Knowledge Graph is at least partly responsible for recent increases in Google's revenue, which currently stands at around $200 million a day.[6] (Income after expenses is about a third of that, i.e. $65 million.)

The development of Wikidata was co-funded by Google, which I understand donated 325,000 Euros (about $345,000) to that effort.[8] A little bit of arithmetic shows that, with Google's profits running at $65 million a day, it takes Google less than 8 minutes to earn that amount of money. Given how much Google stands to benefit from this development, it seems a paltry investment.

This set me thinking. If we assume that Wikipedia's and Wikidata's contribution to Google's annual revenue via the Knowledge Graph is just 1/365 – the revenue of one day per year – the monetary value of these projects to Google is still astronomical.

There have been around 2.5 billion edits to Wikimedia projects to date.[7] If Google chose to give one day's revenue each year to Wikimedia volunteers, as a thank-you, this would average out at about 200,000,000 / 2,500,000,000 = 8 cents per edit. Someone like Koavf, who's made 1.5 million edits[9], would stand to receive around $120,000 a year. Even my paltry 50,000 edits would net me about $4,000 a year. That's the value of free content.

And that's just Google. Other major players like Facebook and Bing profit, too.

Wikidata seems custom-made to benefit Google and Microsoft, at the expense of Wikipedia and other sites. Given my other commitments to Wikimedia projects, the limited number of hours in a day, and all the other concerns mentioned in this thread, I feel little inclined at present to further expand my volunteering in order to work for these multi-billion dollar corporations for free.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-10-07/Op-ed [2]

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/03/manipulating-wikipedia-promote-bogus-busi... [3]

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/revenge_ego_and_the_corruption_of_wikipedia/ [4]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/15/the-great-wi... [5]

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/croatian-wikipedia-fascist-takeover-controv... [6] https://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q2_google_earnings.html [7] https://tools.wmflabs.org/wmcounter/ [8] https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Pressemitteilungen/PM_3_12_Wikidata_EN [9]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/22/you-dont-kno... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Gerard,

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

When you compare the quality of Wikipedias with what en.wp used to be you

are comparing apples and oranges. The Myanmar Wikipedia is better informed on Myanmar than en.wp etc.

Is it? The entire Burmese Wikipedia contains a mere 31,646 content pages at the time of writing, covering (or trying to cover) all countries of the world, and all aspects of human knowledge.[1]

The English Wikipedia's WikiProject Myanmar, meanwhile, has 6,713 pages within its purview.[2] I dare say that's more articles on Myanmar than the Burmese Wikipedia contains. As an indication, the English Wikipedia's article on Myanmar is more than twice as long as the one in the Burmese Wikipedia.

Moreover, according to Freedom House[3], the internet in Myanmar is not free:

"The government detained and charged internet users for online activities [...] Government officials pressured social media users not to distribute or share content that offends the military, or disturbs the functions of government."

When you qualify a Wikipedia as fascist, it does not follow that the data is suspect. Certainly when data in a source that you so easily dismiss is typically the same, there is not much meaning in what you say from a Wikidata point of view.

Data are always generated within a social context, and data generated by political extremists or people living under oppressive regimes are suspect whenever they have political implications. (Looking at the descriptions of Burmese politics, my feeling is the Burmese Wikipedia is not under significant government control, but largely written by ex-pats. However, the situation is quite different in some other Wikipedias serving countries labouring under similar regimes.)

PS What does your librarian think when she knows

It was a he, but I'll leave him to join in himself if he chooses to.

I happen to work on Dukes of Friuli. Compare the data from Wikidata and the

information by Reasonator based on the same item for one of them.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=2471519 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2471519

Let's look at this example. Reasonator says of Grasulf II of Friulim, "He died in 653". There is no source. Wikidata says he died in 653, and the indicated source is the Italian Wikipedia.

However, when you look at the (very brief) Italian Wikipedia article[4], you will find that the year 653 is given with a question mark. The English Wikipedia, in contrast, states, in its similarly brief article[5],

"Nothing more is known about Grasulf and the date of his death is uncertain."

Do you now see the problem about nuance? Reasonator and Wikidata confidently proclaim as uncontested fact something that in fact is rather uncertain.

The sole source cited by both the English and the Italian Wikipedia is the Historia Langobardorum, available in Wikisource.[6] My Latin is a bit rusty, but while the Historia mentions that Ago succeeded Grasulf upon the latter's death, it says nothing specific about when that was. The Historia's time indications are in general very vague, usually limited to the phrase "Circa haec tempora", meaning "about this time". So it is in this case.

For reference, the Google Knowledge Graph states equally confidently that Grasulf II of Friuli died in 651AD. This may be based on the English Wikipedia's unsourced claim (in the template at the bottom of the English Wikipedia article) that his reign ended c. 651, or on some other source like Freebase.

The other Wikipedias that have articles on Grasulf II provide the following death dates

Catalan: 651 Galician: 653 Lithuanian: 653 Polish: 651 Romanian: Unknown Russian: 653 Ukrainian: 651

As for published sources, I can offer Ersch's Allgemeine Encyclopädie (1849), which states on page 209 that Grasulf II died in 651.[7]

The extreme vagueness of the available dates is pointed out by Thomas Hodgkin in Vol. 7 of "Italy and Her Invaders" (1895). Hodgkin puts the end of Grasulf's reign at 645, "as a mere random guess", and adds that "De Rubeis, following Sigonius", puts the accession of Ago in 661.[8]

There may well be better and more recent sources beyond my reach, but having these published dates in Wikidata, with the source references, would actually make some sense. Unsourced data, not so much.

Answers are comfortable, but they are not knowledge when they are unverifiable and/or wrong.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#10_000.2B_articles [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Myanmar_(Burma)/Assessme...

[3] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/myanmar [4] https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulfo_II_del_Friuli&oldid=... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulf_II_of_Friuli&oldid=63... [6] https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Historia_Langobardorum/Liber_IV [7] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FzxYAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=grasulf... [8] https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ToOAwAAQBAJ&dq=grasulf+friuli+651%7...

That male librarian here.

I think we need to encourage people to add more and conflicting data to Wikidata, and to cite their sources when they do so. Currently it's not particularly easy to cite your sources on Wikidata. So the end result is that it encourages people to view whatever single uncited bit of data appears there as the one true fact.

On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Ed Erhart the.ed17@gmail.com wrote:

On the very specific point of knowledge and how it's not always possible to boil it down to a single quantifiable value, I couldn't agree more. Thank you, Andreas, for the detailed anecdote displaying that problem, and I'll be happy to provide more if needed.

Does Wikidata have a way of marking data entries as estimates, or at least dates as circa (not just unknown)?

--Ed On Nov 28, 2015 1:24 PM, "Andreas Kolbe" jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

...

Gerard,

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

When you compare the quality of Wikipedias with what en.wp used to be you

...

are comparing apples and oranges. The Myanmar Wikipedia is better

informed

...

on Myanmar than en.wp etc.

Is it? The entire Burmese Wikipedia contains a mere 31,646 content pages at the time of writing, covering (or trying to cover) all countries of the world, and all aspects of human knowledge.[1]

The English Wikipedia's WikiProject Myanmar, meanwhile, has 6,713 pages within its purview.[2] I dare say that's more articles on Myanmar than the Burmese Wikipedia contains. As an indication, the English Wikipedia's article on Myanmar is more than twice as long as the one in the Burmese Wikipedia.

Moreover, according to Freedom House[3], the internet in Myanmar is not free:

"The government detained and charged internet users for online activities [...] Government officials pressured social media users not to distribute or share content that offends the military, or disturbs the functions of government."

...

When you qualify a Wikipedia as fascist, it does not follow that the data is suspect. Certainly when data in a source that you so easily dismiss is typically the same, there is not much meaning in what you say from a Wikidata point of view.

Data are always generated within a social context, and data generated by political extremists or people living under oppressive regimes are suspect whenever they have political implications. (Looking at the descriptions of Burmese politics, my feeling is the Burmese Wikipedia is not under significant government control, but largely written by ex-pats. However, the situation is quite different in some other Wikipedias serving countries labouring under similar regimes.)

...

PS What does your librarian think when she knows

It was a he, but I'll leave him to join in himself if he chooses to.

I happen to work on Dukes of Friuli. Compare the data from Wikidata and the

...

information by Reasonator based on the same item for one of them.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=2471519 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2471519

Let's look at this example. Reasonator says of Grasulf II of Friulim, "He died in 653". There is no source. Wikidata says he died in 653, and the indicated source is the Italian Wikipedia.

However, when you look at the (very brief) Italian Wikipedia article[4], you will find that the year 653 is given with a question mark. The English Wikipedia, in contrast, states, in its similarly brief article[5],

"Nothing more is known about Grasulf and the date of his death is uncertain."

Do you now see the problem about nuance? Reasonator and Wikidata confidently proclaim as uncontested fact something that in fact is rather uncertain.

The sole source cited by both the English and the Italian Wikipedia is the Historia Langobardorum, available in Wikisource.[6] My Latin is a bit rusty, but while the Historia mentions that Ago succeeded Grasulf upon the latter's death, it says nothing specific about when that was. The Historia's time indications are in general very vague, usually limited to the phrase "Circa haec tempora", meaning "about this time". So it is in this case.

For reference, the Google Knowledge Graph states equally confidently that Grasulf II of Friuli died in 651AD. This may be based on the English Wikipedia's unsourced claim (in the template at the bottom of the English Wikipedia article) that his reign ended c. 651, or on some other source like Freebase.

The other Wikipedias that have articles on Grasulf II provide the following death dates

Catalan: 651 Galician: 653 Lithuanian: 653 Polish: 651 Romanian: Unknown Russian: 653 Ukrainian: 651

As for published sources, I can offer Ersch's Allgemeine Encyclopädie (1849), which states on page 209 that Grasulf II died in 651.[7]

The extreme vagueness of the available dates is pointed out by Thomas Hodgkin in Vol. 7 of "Italy and Her Invaders" (1895). Hodgkin puts the end of Grasulf's reign at 645, "as a mere random guess", and adds that "De Rubeis, following Sigonius", puts the accession of Ago in 661.[8]

There may well be better and more recent sources beyond my reach, but having these published dates in Wikidata, with the source references, would actually make some sense. Unsourced data, not so much.

Answers are comfortable, but they are not knowledge when they are unverifiable and/or wrong.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#10_000.2B_articles [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Myanmar_(Burma)/Assessme...

[3] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/myanmar [4]

https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulfo_II_del_Friuli&oldid=... [5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulf_II_of_Friuli&oldid=63... [6] https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Historia_Langobardorum/Liber_IV [7]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FzxYAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=grasulf... [8]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ToOAwAAQBAJ&dq=grasulf+friuli+651%7... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

---

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Hoi, It was from the Myanmar WIkipedia that a lot of data was imported to Wikidata. Data that did not exist elsewhere. I do not care really what "Freedom House" says. I do not know them, I do know that the data is relevant and useful It was even the subject on a blogpost..

You may ignore data that is not from a source that you like. This indiscriminate POV is not a NPOV.

As to Grasulf, you failed to get the point. It was NOT about the data itself but about the presentation. I worked on this item because a duplicate was created with even less data.

While I happily agree that Sources are good, I will not ask people to start adding Sources at this point of time it will not improve quality signifcantly. It makes more sense once we are at a stage where multiple sources disagree on values for statements. Adding sources is signifcantly more meaningful and useful once we start curating data. Statistically most errors will be found where sources disagree.

When people add conflicting data, it is indeed really relevant to add Sources. My practice for adding data is that I will only add data that fulfils some minimal criteria. Typically I am not interested in adding data that already exists. I will remove less precise for more precise data.

The biggest issue with data is that we do not have enough of it and the second most relevant issue is that we need processes to compare sources with Wikidata and have a workflow to curate differences. Thanks, GerardM

On 28 November 2015 at 19:23, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

Gerard,

On Fri, Nov 27, 2015, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

When you compare the quality of Wikipedias with what en.wp used to be you

...

are comparing apples and oranges. The Myanmar Wikipedia is better

informed

...

on Myanmar than en.wp etc.

Is it? The entire Burmese Wikipedia contains a mere 31,646 content pages at the time of writing, covering (or trying to cover) all countries of the world, and all aspects of human knowledge.[1]

The English Wikipedia's WikiProject Myanmar, meanwhile, has 6,713 pages within its purview.[2] I dare say that's more articles on Myanmar than the Burmese Wikipedia contains. As an indication, the English Wikipedia's article on Myanmar is more than twice as long as the one in the Burmese Wikipedia.

Moreover, according to Freedom House[3], the internet in Myanmar is not free:

"The government detained and charged internet users for online activities [...] Government officials pressured social media users not to distribute or share content that offends the military, or disturbs the functions of government."

...

When you qualify a Wikipedia as fascist, it does not follow that the data is suspect. Certainly when data in a source that you so easily dismiss is typically the same, there is not much meaning in what you say from a Wikidata point of view.

Data are always generated within a social context, and data generated by political extremists or people living under oppressive regimes are suspect whenever they have political implications. (Looking at the descriptions of Burmese politics, my feeling is the Burmese Wikipedia is not under significant government control, but largely written by ex-pats. However, the situation is quite different in some other Wikipedias serving countries labouring under similar regimes.)

...

PS What does your librarian think when she knows

It was a he, but I'll leave him to join in himself if he chooses to.

I happen to work on Dukes of Friuli. Compare the data from Wikidata and the

...

information by Reasonator based on the same item for one of them.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?&q=2471519 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2471519

Let's look at this example. Reasonator says of Grasulf II of Friulim, "He died in 653". There is no source. Wikidata says he died in 653, and the indicated source is the Italian Wikipedia.

However, when you look at the (very brief) Italian Wikipedia article[4], you will find that the year 653 is given with a question mark. The English Wikipedia, in contrast, states, in its similarly brief article[5],

"Nothing more is known about Grasulf and the date of his death is uncertain."

Do you now see the problem about nuance? Reasonator and Wikidata confidently proclaim as uncontested fact something that in fact is rather uncertain.

The sole source cited by both the English and the Italian Wikipedia is the Historia Langobardorum, available in Wikisource.[6] My Latin is a bit rusty, but while the Historia mentions that Ago succeeded Grasulf upon the latter's death, it says nothing specific about when that was. The Historia's time indications are in general very vague, usually limited to the phrase "Circa haec tempora", meaning "about this time". So it is in this case.

For reference, the Google Knowledge Graph states equally confidently that Grasulf II of Friuli died in 651AD. This may be based on the English Wikipedia's unsourced claim (in the template at the bottom of the English Wikipedia article) that his reign ended c. 651, or on some other source like Freebase.

The other Wikipedias that have articles on Grasulf II provide the following death dates

Catalan: 651 Galician: 653 Lithuanian: 653 Polish: 651 Romanian: Unknown Russian: 653 Ukrainian: 651

As for published sources, I can offer Ersch's Allgemeine Encyclopädie (1849), which states on page 209 that Grasulf II died in 651.[7]

The extreme vagueness of the available dates is pointed out by Thomas Hodgkin in Vol. 7 of "Italy and Her Invaders" (1895). Hodgkin puts the end of Grasulf's reign at 645, "as a mere random guess", and adds that "De Rubeis, following Sigonius", puts the accession of Ago in 661.[8]

There may well be better and more recent sources beyond my reach, but having these published dates in Wikidata, with the source references, would actually make some sense. Unsourced data, not so much.

Answers are comfortable, but they are not knowledge when they are unverifiable and/or wrong.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias#10_000.2B_articles [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Myanmar_(Burma)/Assessme...

[3] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2015/myanmar [4]

https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulfo_II_del_Friuli&oldid=... [5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grasulf_II_of_Friuli&oldid=63... [6] https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Historia_Langobardorum/Liber_IV [7]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FzxYAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=grasulf... [8]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ToOAwAAQBAJ&dq=grasulf+friuli+651%7... _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe