On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 4:06 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 11:28 AM, Andrea Zanni
<zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Andreas, you apparently did not read the
following sentence:
"Of course, the opposite is also true: it's a single point of openness,
correction, information. "
Andrea,
I understand and appreciate your point, but I would like you to consider
that what you say may be less true of Wikidata than it is for other
Wikimedia wikis, for several reasons:
Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. are functionally open and correctable because
people by and large view their content on Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. itself
(or in places where the provenance is clearly indicated, thanks to CC
BY-SA). The place where you read it is the same place where you can edit
it. There is an "Edit" tab, and it really *is* easy to change the content.
(It is certainly easy to correct a typo, which is how many of us started.)
You are used to the edit tab being there. Someone recently said on
Twitter this is the most displayed invisible link on the internet. All
a matter of perspective and what we are used to ;-)
With Wikidata, this is different. Wikidata, as a
semantic wiki, is designed
to be read by machines. These machines don't edit, they *propagate*.
Wikidata is not a site that end users--human beings--will browse and
consult the way people consult Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Commons, etc.
Machines (with people behind them) _do_ edit Wikidata. Wikidata is
designed to be read and written my both humans and machines. And it is
used that way.
Wikidata is, or will be, of interest mostly to
re-users--search engines and
other intermediaries who will use its machine-readable data as an input to
build and design their own content. And when they use Wikidata as an input,
they don't have to acknowledge the source.
Allowing unattributed re-use may *seem* more open. But I contend that in
practice it makes Wikidata *less* open as a wiki: because when people don't
know where the information comes from, they are also unable to contribute
at source. The underlying Wikimedia project effectively becomes invisible
to them, a closed book.
That is not good for a crowdsourced project from multiple points of view.
Firstly, it impedes recruitment. Far fewer consumers of Wikidata
information will become Wikidata editors, because they will typically find
Wikidata content on other sites where Wikidata is not even mentioned.
That is why I am working with re-users of Wikidata's data on this.
They can link to Wikidata. They can build ways to let their users edit
in-place. inventaire and Histropedia are two projects that show the
start of this. As I wrote in my Signpost piece it needs work and
education that is ongoing.
Secondly, it reduces transparency. Data provenance is
important, as Mark
Graham and Heather Ford have pointed out.
Thirdly, it fails to encourage appropriate vigilance in the consumer. (The
error propagation problems I've described in this thread all involved
unattributed re-use of Wikimedia content.)
There are other reasons why Wikidata is less open, besides CC0 and the lack
of attribution.
Wikidata is the least user-friendly Wikimedia wiki. The hurdle that
newbies--even experienced Wikimedians--have to overcome to contribute is an
order of magnitude higher than it is for other Wikimedia projects.
Granted Wikidata isn't the most userfriendly at this point - which is
why we are working on improvements in that area. Some of them have
gone live just the other week. More will go live in January.
For a start, there is no Edit tab at the top of the
page. When you go to
Barack Obama's entry in Wikidata[1] for example, the word "Edit" is not to
be found anywhere on the page. It does not look like a page you can edit
(and indeed, members of the public can't edit it).
Now please go to any other page that is not protected. It has edit
links plastered all over it. Editing there is much much more obvious
than on Wikipedia.
I really encourage you to actually go and edit on Wikidata for longer
than 2 minutes.
It took me a while to figure out that the item is
protected (just like the
Jerusalem item).
We have a lock icon in the top right corner to indicate protected
items like this.
In other Wikimedia wikis that do have an
"Edit" tab, that tab changes to
"View source" if the page is protected, giving a visual indication of the
page's status that people--Wikimedia insiders at least--can recognise.
Unprotected Wikidata items do have "edit" and "add" links, but they
are
less prominent. (The "add" link for adding new properties is hidden away at
the very bottom of the page.) And when you do click "edit" or "add",
it is
not obvious what you are supposed to do, the way it is in text-based wikis.
It is not a text-based wiki. So yes some things work differently. That
doesn't necessarily mean they are worse. I dispute your claim that the
edit links on Wikidata are less prominent than on Wikipedia.
The learning curve involved in actually editing a
Wikidata item is far
steeper than it is in other Wikimedia wikis. There is no Wikidata
equivalent of the "correcting a typo" edit in Wikipedia. You need to go
away and learn the syntax before you can do anything at all in Wikidata.
There is the equivalent of fixing a typo. All edits on Wikidata are
much more similar to a typo fix on Wikipedia than not. Fixing the year
in the date of birth of a person for example is pretty quick and I'd
argue easy. And since it is editing in place it is arguably easier
than finding the date in a Wikipedia article's infobox template.
Please go and actually try it our without prejudice.
I am the first to admit that we still have a long way to go when it
comes to usability on Wikidata but the things you bring up are not it,
Andreas.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
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