Under the current conditions of Wikidata, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole, let alone letting it integrating/replacing Wikispecies. And here's the reasons why:
Note: I will be using Canis lupus (Gray wolf) for illustrative purposes.
1) The search result in Wikidata is woefully incorrectly. If I type in Canis lupus in Wikidata search, the correct result turns up on the 18th item on the search list. [1] 2) Spelling variation completely throws off Wikidata search. If I search for Grey wolf (with an e and not an a), Wikidata said there is no page found. [2] 3) It's lacking taxonomy navigation, which is crucial for a taxonomy database. Even Commons do a better job than Wikidata. [3]
To show that this is a much more widespread problem (and avoid me being accused of cherry-picking), I will be using Black Oak as the search term for following example.
4) Wikidata is very poor at handling different scientific species names that share the same common name based on different locations. A search on Wikipedia identifies three tree species [4] (one in western U.S., one in eastern U.S. + Canada, one in Australia). Same search on Wikispecies correctly identifies the first two species on Wikipedia. [5] The Australian species page was not yet created on Wikispecies so you can conclude that the correct rate is 2 out of 2 (100%), or 2 out of 3 (66.6%) if you argue that missing page should be counted. Conducting the same search on Wikidata brings up 7 pages. [6] None of them were species pages (they were either links to a band, an album that band produced, or a town). The correct rate on Wikidata is 0 out of 3, or 0%.
I haven't had time to investigate on the accuracy of the interwiki links on Wikidata but I think I could write an essay on how inaccurate those links point to. Plus, where will you store reference links to articles that describe the species. Certainly it's not on Wikidata or Commons and I rarely see editors do that on Wikipedia. Through my examples presented above, I believe that Wikidata is ill-suited to integrate with Wikispecies and in my opinion, we should be very cautious about the data quality of Wikidata if we decide to import information from there into Wikispecies.
[1] http://en.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=Canis+lupus&title=Special%3ASe... [2] http://en.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=defaul... [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Canis_lupus [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_oak [5] http://species.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=bla... [6] http://en.wikidata.org/w/index.php?search=Black+oak&title=Special%3ASear...
Andrew
"Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 03:03:45 +0100 From: nemowiki@gmail.com To: jelle.zijlstra@gmail.com CC: andrewcleung@hotmail.com; wikispecies-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikispecies-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Lsjbot has now started to generate 1-1, 5 M articles of species on sv:wp
Jelle Zijlstra, 13/01/2013 02:34:
I'm skeptical that mass creation of species articles is a good idea, at least until we have good integration with Wikidata. Such a bot would work with database data, and database data belongs in a database. Who is going to maintain millions of articles in a small Wikipedia when taxonomic changes happen, errors in the underlying database are corrected, or new information becomes available? On the English Wikipedia, we have enough of a problem maintaining the articles Polbot generated; the problems will be far worse on a smaller wiki that has fewer people qualified to work on biological articles.
Wikipedias are better at providing textual, complex information that does not fit well in a database. For database data, we should provide a bridge to a database (e.g., Wikidata), not replicate database content in an unmaintainable form.
I surely agree with you, but I think Wikispecies is the only wiki exempt from such a consideration: it's its job, after all. As for Wikidata, there's https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/Future#Wikispecies which would use some additional work. As far as I understand, given that use of Wikidata for all projects other than Wikipedia is very far in the future, it's currently considered ok to have a plan where data is first ingested on a local wiki and then migrated to Wikidata. All the data they're adding to sv.wiki will eventually go to Wikidata together with all infoboxes data, so some kind of central planning is needed and Wikispecies seems the most logical place. Again, if the Wikispecies community is interested you should probably get some feedback from the Wikidata team, but also not wait indefinitely for some perfect solution before starting work to make things less broken.
Nemo