On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 11:37 PM, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
5.People need to able to trust all data in WikiData, otherwise they just wont use it because as Wikidata expands the same PR firms, interest groups which have seen so many of WP issues will gravitate to the easier to manipulate WikiData
I think the potential problem here is far worse: people *will use* the data, because their lack of trustworthiness, as amply described in the Wikidata disclaimer[1], is no longer visible when they're displayed as "fact" by dominant search engines.
Google is already committed to Wikidata. Wikidata is in part a Google project. This means information placed in Wikidata may in time have the potential to reach an audience of billions – a far greater audience than Wikipedia has.
People already blindly copy falsehoods from Wikipedia today, because important caveats (like checking the sourcing to assess the reliability of a Wikipedia article) are widely ignored. As a result, circular references and citogenesis have become a significant problem for Wikipedia.
People are far more likely still to copy blindly from Google. It's circular referencing on steroids.
The way things are headed, manipulations in Wikidata that enter the Google Knowledge Graph, Bing Satori, etc. could end up having far greater leverage than any Wikipedia manipulation has ever had. In the worst-case scenario – depending on how much search engines will come to rely on Wikidata – an edit war won by anonymous players in an obscure corner of Wikidata might literally redefine truth for the English-speaking internet.
Is this really a good thing? Are checks and balances in place to prevent this from happening?
Lets build something based on the lessons learnt on Wikipedia over the last 15 years rather than duplicate those missteps
That seems like good advice to me. The online world's information infrastructure shouldn't be built on sand.
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:General_disclaimer – highlights: "Wikidata cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. [...] No formal peer review[:] Wikidata does not have an executive editor or editorial board that vets content before it is published. Our active community of editors uses tools such as the Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages feeds to monitor new and changing content. However, Wikidata is not uniformly peer reviewed; while readers may correct errors or engage in casual peer review, they have no legal duty to do so and thus all information read here is without any implied warranty of fitness for any purpose or use whatsoever. None of the contributors, sponsors, administrators or anyone else connected with Wikidata in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages [...] neither is anyone at Wikidata responsible should someone change, edit, modify or remove any information that you may post on Wikidata or any of its associated projects."