Not a contribution to the discussion at large, but I had the same problem Andreas is mentioning a couple of days ago when doing some of my first WD edits and adding a reference. I had no idea what to chose in that property field and it only showed me “instance of” and “subclass of” as a cold start. (I guess your average new editor might even wonder why to enter a property at all there - they would probably expect a single field to enter the source.) So I just went to some other items and checked how it was done there, which is not optimal. A pre-selection of relevant properties (maybe most used in other items?) in the type-ahead would be nice. And maybe a small explanation of what the property for references means (something like “specifies type of reference” ?). I was also unsure if and when to ever use “imported from” in that field (i.e., if I got the fact from a Wikipedia page, but no primary source exists) or if that was reserved for machine imports.
Fabian
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 2015 15:59:58 +0000 From: Andreas Kolbe <jayen466@gmail.com mailto:jayen466@gmail.com> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Quality issues
Just try it, Lydia. Click "add" in subsidiaries in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q37156 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.