On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Lydia Pintscher < lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de> wrote:
At any rate, this is what I did. After I clicked "add reference", I got a new field that came with a "property" drop down menu pre-populated with "sex or gender", "date of birth", "given name", "occupation", "country of citizenship", "GND identifier" and "image", none of which are remotely relevant to entering a reference.
Those should not have shown up for references and I am not aware of issues with that. Which statement was this specifically? The suggestions are not always perfect but at least the distinction between properties in the main part of the statement and its references should work very well.
Just try it, Lydia. Click "add" in subsidiaries in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q37156 -- enter a company name, and then click "add reference". When I do that, the text field contains a greyed-out "property", and the drop-down shows the unhelpful items I mentioned above.
And it would be good if the help text actually *asked* people to cite a reference.
Use a licence that requires re-users to mention "Wikidata" on their
sites,
ideally with a link to the Wikidata disclaimer, and you won't have to do any education at all, and at the same time you'll have done a great thing for transparency of data provenance on the internet.
Moreover, you will have ensured that hundreds of millions of Internet
users
are told where they can find Wikidata and edit it. Surely, if you
actually
*want* to have human beings visiting and editing your wiki, that's in
your
interest?
I think we have to agree to disagree on the licensing part and what is best for Wikidata there. Yes I do want people to come to Wikidata but I do not want the license to be our forceful stick to achieve this. We have to work to build a project that people want to come to and contribute to. And we can do it as the number of editors for example shows.
Can you tell me just whose interests it serves if re-users do not have to indicate that the data they're showing their users come from Wikidata? Max Klein mused that the big search engines might be paying for Wikidata "to remove a blemish on their perceived omniscience", because they can present Wikidata content as though they had compiled it themselves.[1] That is at least a plausible line of thought; but whom else does it serve?
It does not serve the end user, because they are left in the dark about the provenance of the data. Moreover, they may not understand that these are crowdsourced data, to which certain caveats always apply.
It does not serve Wikidata's interests, because many consumers of Wikidata content who might otherwise come to edit the wiki, correct errors, refine information and so on, will lack the bridge that would take them there.
We are a non-profit. The public good, the benefit to society, should be our only concern.
So, who in society benefits, other than (arguably) the big commercial search engines? Please explain.
Andreas