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]
Andrew
"Fill the world with children who care and things start looking up."
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 03:03:45 +0100
From: nemowiki(a)gmail.com
To: jelle.zijlstra(a)gmail.com
CC: andrewcleung(a)hotmail.com; wikispecies-l(a)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