Disclaimer first - I'm not exactly conversant in the intricacies of
WikiData, if I was to take the information on 14th Dalai Lama
the en article has 2 references that list his date of birth, the WikiData
item has two references for the same piece of information
WikiData source;
1. just says imported from Russian language Wikipedia, which links to
Wikidata page on the Russian Wikipedia not to the source url nor does it
link to permanent url so as a source its meaningless, while may just be the
result of who did the data import linking to Russian language Wikipedia is
kind of obscure for a source, I can understand a tibetan, mandarin, or
cantonese language source as they would be associated with the region
2. Integrated Authority File links to
on WikiData it doesnt provide a url
or any other information which enables someone to verify what is said
Despite two reference the data itself appears to be immediately untraceable
to a reliable source.
The circular reference of Wikidata to a Wikipedia of any language is ok but
the link should be traceable to a specific article version which would then
make it possible to verify the data even if the current data on Wikipedia
is changed after its imported, that in itself shouldnt be difficult to
engineer. If that was the case then to me a Wikipedia reference for all
data is a reasonable minimum standard to start at, finding a way to
replicate the same data 2891 times in Liams scenario shouldnt be much of a
challenge if WP can replicate templates in 100,000 articles, as a standard
we have GLAM making donations of images in quantities of 10,000's I htnk
someone has already solved this in a meaningful way
On 27 November 2015 at 20:51, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The Wikimedia movement has always had an
important principle: that all
content should be traceable to a "reliable source". Throughout the first
decade of this movement and beyond, Wikimedia content has never been
considered a reliable source. For example, you can't use a Wikipedia
article as a reference in another Wikipedia article.
Another important principle has been the disclaimer: pointing out to
people
that the data is anonymously crowdsourced, and
that there is no guarantee
of reliability or fitness for use.
Both of these principles are now being jettisoned.
Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata...
<snip>
I agree that "reliable source" referencing and "crowdsourced content"
are
indeed principles of our movement. However, I disagree that Wikidata is
"jettisoning" them. In fact, quite the contrary!
The purpose of the statement "imported from --> English Wikipedia" in the
"reference" field of a Wikidata item's statement is PRECISELY to indicate
to the user that this information has not been INDEPENDENTLY verified to a
reliable source and that Wikipedia is NOT considered a reliable source.
Furthermore, it provides a PROVENANCE of that information to help stop
people from circular referencing. That is - clearly stating that the
specific fact in Wikidata has come from Wikipedia helps to avoid the
structured-data equivalent of "citogenisis":
https://xkcd.com/978/ If/When
a person can provide a reliable reference for that same fact, they are
encouraged to add an actual reference. Note, the wikidata statement used
for facts coming in from Wikipedia use the property "imported from". This
is deliberately different from the property "reference URL" which is what
you would use when adding an actual reference to a third-party reliable
online source.
Furthermore, the fact that many statements in Wikidata are not given a
reference (yet) is not necessarily a "problem". For example - this
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21481859 is a Wikidata item for a
scientific
publication with 2891 co-authors!! This is an extreme example, but it
demonstrates my point... None of those 2891 statements has a specific
reference listed for it, because all of them are self-evidently referenced
to the scientific publication itself. The same is true of the other
properties applied to this item (volume, publication date, title, page
number...). All of these could be "referenced" to the very first property
in the Wikidata item - the DOI of the scientific article:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269312008581 This
item is not "less reliable" because it doesn't have the same footnote
repeated almost three thousand times, but if you merely look at statistics
of "unreferenced wikidata statements" it would APPEAR that it is very
poorly cited.
So, I think we need a more nuanced view of what "proper referencing" means
in the context of Wikidata.
-Liam
wittylama.com
Peace, love & metadata
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