Distr game on Wikidata - Wikimedia-l

4 Aug 2019


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