I have been experiencing something similar although I would not call it vandalism, just changing things that are official statistics to something that is not and merging items that are not the same thing. I have recently been importing information on the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves to Wikidata with Navino Evans that includes referencing everything to the official site descriptions on the UNESCO website (he's been doing all the actual work, I mainly offer manual labour and make the tea). People have been replacing the official statistics e.g the coordinates submitted to UNESCO as part of the inscription process with coordinates with no references and also merging sites that are not the same thing (usually similar sounding sites in China and Russia). This is annoying for two reasons:
1. Its making Wikidata less accrurate 2. Its breaking our import spreadsheets meaning we have to use queries to guess at possible reasons why things have broken which takes a really long time and then I have to fix them.
Since we completed the import a few days ago the data has already started to drift with manual additions and changes from other users. I wonder if there is some equivalent of the Wikipedia protected page that could be used to reduce this issue? I don't know what this would look like but it seems as though it may be needed. Perhaps another model to use would be the proofreading mechanism from Wikisource?
Thanks
John
On 9 June 2016 at 15:25, Julie McMurry mcmurry.julie@gmail.com wrote:
How big a problem is fact vandalism? It may be less likely to be detected/fixed in languages for which there are fewer editors. Only if a big problem, I'd suggest that specific text (not whole articles) be protected, but not locked. Eg implementing a requirement for confirmation by multiple editors before it is published. A lock would be too likely to thwart legitimate edits and could be abused by moderators.
Some ostensibly hard facts do in fact change over time. Even the measurement of the mass of the electron took years to perfect.
Julie
On Wednesday, June 8, 2016, Biyanto Rebin biyanto.rebin@wikimedia.or.id wrote:
Hello,
Wikidata is a great collaboration of database, I love it, but sometimes when I encounter some vandalism, it makes me so angry. Just like today, I've found Q879704 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q879704, the label, description and alias in Indonesian (ID) is vandal into something else and it was happened in 2014 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/202.67.33.46!
Now, I'm just curious, will everyone agree if (maybe) in the future Wikidata team can lock some cell that already fix? For example Javanese (Q33549) = P31: language (Q315). Or we just let the Wikidata always open for everyone to edit?
PS: I'm making WikiProjects Languages in Indonesia https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Languages_in_Indonesia, anyone who want to join please let me know :)
Best regards,
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