I second all Lydia's answers.
Also, I do think that there is a huge difference between usability/UX
issues and core, fundamental, systemic issues.
I personally think, Andreas, that you are displaying usability issues,
which are solvable (not easy, and not trivial, but at least can be fixed).
Regarding the CC0 vs CC-BY-SA problem, I don't think a single switch
between license would solve all the attribution problem: it hasn't solved
propagation of errors in the past with Wikipedia, I don't really get how it
could solve propagation of errors for Wikidata (we do know, though, that it
would bring a hell of issues for Wikidata itaself).
Aubrey
On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Lydia Pintscher <
lydia.pintscher(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
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
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
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