Yes I agree. I think most of the discussion here has to do with people conflating the concept of text as in Wikipedia sentences and the concept of data as in Wikidata statements. When a user adds an image from Commons on Wikipedia, the source of the image is generally not added to Wikipedia, and I have never heard anyone complain about that except for image donors who wished that their images *were* attributed when used on Wikipedia. The same is true when Wikipedians add Wikidata statements from an item on Wikipedia. A date statement in Wikidata for a painting may be indirectly referenced in the item in another statement (the collection statement, or a "described at url" statement). This is also true of the way the date field in the Commons artwork template is used.
It is just as undesirable to clutter Wikipedia with a reference for such a date from Wikidata as it is to reference the source of the file image when including images, and so there will generally not be a reference for the pulled date in the Wikidata infobox, because the user can always look up the item for more information. Most paintings included on Wikipedia, with or without infoboxes, do not reference the date field specifically - either to the Commons image or to the article. When they do, this is often in cases where the date has been disputed. Our goal is not to reference everything, but to reference the things that need referencing.
On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwyatt@gmail.com wrote:
On 27 November 2015 at 12:08, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@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
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