I fully agree with Robert and Phoebe in this matter. Wikidata is an option. Requiring first to come up with rules on how to use Wikidata before it is switched on simply won't work, because there is not sufficient interest and experience for this discussion.
Or, put differently, the Wikidata proposal has been published nearly two years ago. We have communicated on all channels for more than one year. I can hardly think of any technical enhancement of Wikipedia - ever - which was communicated as strongly beforehand as Wikidata. If, in that time, the community has not managed to discuss the topic, it might be because such changes only get discussed effectively after they occur.
I base this statement on having studied previous introductions of new technical features to the Wikipedias (check for that my paper with Mathias Schindler), like the category system or parserfunctions.
Since Wikidata phase 2 is actually a less intrusive change than phase 1, and based on the effectiveness of the discussion about phase 2 on the English Wikipedia so far, I think that a post-deployment discussion is the right way to go.
Also, a very important consideration is raised by Phoebe: Wikidata is in its current form still in its infancy, and for a well developed project like the English Wikipedia this means that the actual usage (and effect) is expected to be minimal in the current stage. The deployment of phase 2 this week would merely be a start for an organic co-evolution of Wikidata and the Wikipedias in the months and years to come.
But this can only happen 'in the wild', as a priori debates about the possible usages of such features will remain not only too speculative, but also highly undemocratic due to the minimal engagement of the community in advance.
This email cannot resolve any worries surrounding the deployment of Wikidata phase 2, but then again, no amount of discussion could. But I hope it justifies the decision.
Cheers, Denny, who wrote this Email on his mobile phone because he didn't take his computer to his vacations :-) On Apr 6, 2013 10:40 AM, "Robert Rohde" rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Risker,
You are right that it will undoubtedly get used as soon as it is available, and it is unfortunate that it will presumably get deployed without any agreement having been reached on wiki about how it should be used.
However, when it comes to an area like infoboxes, I think a lot of hardship could be avoided if the community can ultimately come together and adopt a sensible set of guidelines for how wikidata should be used.
For example, one of the reasons Commons is able to work reasonably well within the global context is that every wiki ultimately has the option of ignoring it and uploading locally preferred files instead. I would argue that the use of wikidata in infoboxes should follow much the same principle. Specifically, templates ought to be engineered such that values are obtained from wikidata only when no corresponding value is present locally. So for example, one might have an infobox with a field for birthplace. If enwiki specifies birthplace = Athens, Georgia, then enwiki will be guaranteed to display "Athens, Georgia". And the template should query wikidata only if the field is omitted. So, if birthplace= is left blank, then we might ask wikidata for the answer, and can use the value recorded there, but only so long as no value was filled in locally. That's the kind of behavior that I think makes sense for infoboxes. Decisions about when to rely on local values and when to rely on wikidata are obviously an issue were guidelines are needed. For example, I'd argue that wikidata should never be used to define elements that are likely to be controversial or subject to dispute (e.g. Gdansk/Danzig). It could be a reasonable policy that controversial data values should always be retained using strictly local input. That would limit the potential for controversies over wikidata values from spilling into Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, I suspect we are going to take a while finding our way when it comes to wikidata interactions, though that doesn't necessarily mean we won't ultimately have coherent policies on its use. While obviously a bit late in the game to be starting now, I think many people would welcome a discussion on wiki of what best practices for the use of wikidata ought to look like, and I'm sure your input could be valuable to that discussion.
-Robert Rohde aka Dragons_flight _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l