Experience implementing Wikidata - Wikimedia-l

3 Nov 2013


      Since August we are implementing Wikidata for the Swedish 290 communes 
and 1900 "towns", including automatic update from the authority 
"Statistic Sweden" to Wikidata.
Our original assumption was that it would take us 8 month but it now 
seems it will not be enough, it will probably be more like a year to get 
it fully implemented, and I thought our experiences could be of interest 
to several (even excluding anything of the WD community or the "science" 
of properites etc)
QUALITY
My assumption was that the Swedish articles was 98% correct but that 
Wikidata ought to have 99,8% correct info. We found, though, as a start 
that WD was only 96% correct as it has been loaded from en:wp, which is, 
from a Q point for these entities, worse then de.wp, nl:wp and sw:wp. A 
critical information, that was missing, was the communcode/towncode, 
that is needed to implement an automatic update. In practice this has 
meat we have had to manually check and complement all objects on WD, 
that with its primitive interface meant it taking a very long time, one 
of us even temporary getting "repetitive strain injury"
INTRICACIES
When we have created articles on sv:wp we have only covered some finer 
intricacies of these entities in the article text. But with Wikidata it 
is not enough, it has to be handled fully correct. Trosa commun existed 
1971-1973, was then merged into Nyköpings commun and 1994 broken out  
with some more areas to become again a Trosa commun. Sv.wp hase only one 
article  for Trosa commun, but for wikidata we have created two entities 
one called Trosa commun (1971-73), whos corresponding entity on sw.wp is 
a redirect. Another example: Statistic Sweden defines the boundary of a 
town by strange advanced citerias meaning a real town is some year  is 
seen by them as two towns. We have of these reasons been forced to 
define new properties, and create some hundred new entities in Wikidata, 
and check the corresponding redirect articles on sv:wp, giving them 
Categories etc, all OK but it takes time...
POTENTIAL
We are still convinced of the strong potential of WIkidata, but believe 
the full benefits requires an a (semi)automatic update of data from the 
authorities databases.  In our case "Statistic Sweden" are positive, 
believe in Open data and have a nice API, but it is a new component for 
us to take care of, the datatransfer/update program/script, who will be 
responsible for this etc?
Experience from others are welcome to us
Anders