Hi.
You said that you find an area where there is a problem. I found another one
too, taxonomy, and in this case I am quite sure it won't be solved for a while
even without better diagnostic tools. Yet I am optimistic on the long term. I
have also found areas where problems were similar to yours, and they were
solved. Like the examples of ancient Greece items. In that case you need enough
people that knows ancient Greek, possibly, and those can be rare to find as
well.
For one thing you notice, there are other ones other people noticed. But they
also see them improving, we have examples.
As far I can say from my experience, the main issue, if the discrepancies were
not structural (that is: in the sources), was not having a super tool. In the
end, it was about understanding the sources. Tools help, they are cool, is nice
to show them, but you need human resources. For all these possible gaps I can
notice, my strategy is to look for people.
Sometimes I ask to improve tools based specifically on what these people, the
newbies of wikidata, want, not what the "expert users" want. I don't say these
people know what is best but they kinda feel what is necessary, especially what
is necessary to integrate more users with specific necessary knowledge in the
workflow.
So my core advice remain the same: create a dedicated project, ask users
interested in the topic, teach them wikidata. You can teach them without a
project too, but I guess the project could help.
I made you one example in the private mail, the situation of the Italian
hamlets imported by some archive on some minor wikipedians (to pick a theme
among possible dozens). Some of them are correct, some of them are weird . They
are still there but, as I said, if you want to get rid of the trash I can find
you 30 users now willing to clean up in a short amount of time and leave only
what has a real meaning. So it's not so bad. I could have written general
emails and the structural starting point would have not changed this way.
What I am trying to say is that you probably have around the human resources to
tackle most of this cluster of work, you just have to find them. I see the
energy inside the communities. Your mail is more centered on the issue, the
guideline, the possible tool... it 's not "warm". You don't seem to consider
the people who should do the continuous, constant work. You describe something
where you are alone and I might say, if I ask this help inside the wikidata
community, I have the same feeling sometimes. That is true, since there are
many small tasks that are much simpler, very generic tasks that are interesting
to write a nerdy post on ablog, or virgin areas ready to be conquered massively
importing data from archives... and many established wikidata users prefer to
focus on these things. But when I look for users at the level of local
communities, I had much less problems, i had good feedback. That's it. And that
is why I am basically optimistic.
When I see a situation that is not evolving inside wikidata, my instinct
remains to ask around to people who create real content wherever they are.
About this specific problem, did you contact the users who created these
contents on local wikipedias? 50% of them should have a decent English working
proficiency, in my experience. Did you scroll the history of the pages here and
there, found the most common usernames dedicated to their creation and
maintennace, and left the a message in their user talks? that's what I am
trying to understand.
Il Lunedì 16 Luglio 2018 8:13, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>
ha scritto:
Hoi,Thanks for your reply. There is one big issue that you do not address and,
it is best explained using a Wikipedia "best practice". The best practice is
that a town, a village whatever is known to be in the next level
"administrative territorial entities". This is done properly for the first
world. Where Wikidata does not hold data, as it often does, it cannot help in
info boxes but what I find is that the data of the Wikipedia is wrong for more
than 6% when I add information.
It does not matter that the information is fractured; coming from many sources.
The data for Egyptian subdivisions is largely in Arabic. This is not something
I can curate but it is something that can be presented.
What does matter is that differences between Wikipedias and Wikidata are not
noticed. Of particular importance is where the data is biased or wrong.
Particularly where the data is wrong and is about "administrative territorial
entities", I have had push back because English Wikipedia was said to be wrong
[1]... My interpretation of the facts is that the German article was better
written but out of date.
In this mail thread, I raise the issue of differences between Wikipedias,
differences between projects and Wikidata. Particularly where the data/articles
are biased or wrong our quality suffers. When for a subject the error rate is
more than 6%, the error rate is more than can be expected of human adding good
faith information to a project. The data I am adding at this time supports
Wikipedia best practices. It is particularly intended for the "minority
languages" [2] but the quality of all our data will be improved when we are
aware of the differences and curate them everywhere.
This is distinctly different from the issue with Commons; its data is good
enough for its current use case but is what holds it back from becoming the
resource you goto because you can "find" what you are seeking.
In a nutshell our problem is that we work in an insular fashion. We do not have
ways to find the differences, the errors, the bias between our projects. We
could do, suggestions for a basic mechanism have been made. Our quality suffers
and it does not need to [3].Thanks, GerardM
[1] https://ultimategerardm. blogspot.com/2018/07/ africagap-where-wikipedias-
collide.html[2] https://ultimategerardm. blogspot.com/2018/07/
africagap-support-for- minority-languages.html[3] https://ultimategerardm.
blogspot.com/2016/01/ wikipedia-lowest-hanging- fruit-from.html
On 16 July 2018 at 05:41, Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l
<[email protected]> wrote:
yes, it is an old issue, what you say it's right but I would be more optimistic.
To summarize my view (I couls send you more information privately)
1. Wikidata largely reflected what Wikipedia indicated, and that was not the
right way to make it grow, but that was also the past. At the moment, the
reference of the content is increasing, the clean-up too. In some areas,
wikidata items are also created before the wikipedia articles nowadays.
2. new tools are great and will do a lot, but it's users who do the real
tricks. You have to start to bring local users to wikidata, show them how it
can be used (automatic infoboxes, fast creation of stubs, automatic lists,
detecing missing images). They will start to fix the issues, curating their
wikipedia, wikidata and also indirectly influence the other ones.
3. IMHO, the wikidata ecosystem is not so bad, it could have more expert users
with real knowledge of topics, but commons with millions of automatically
imported files, and tons of poorly described and uncategorized images faces a
much worse perspective. You need more tools there than on wikidata, at the
moment, if you want to keep some balanced workflow. What is really missing on
wikidata are mostly active projects to coordinate and catalyze the ongoing
efforts. This one https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/ Wikidata:WikiProject_Ancient_
Greece made miracles, for example. But I couldn't find one about peer-reviewed
researchers or photographers to name a few, at least in the past months.
Investing on this aspect would not change the final situation on wikidata (that
will be positive for me), but it would speed up the process. it will also
influence much more the content on local wikis because it will bring
content-related users closer together and increase their wikidata literacy with
lower effort.
4. In the end, even with a good high quality wikidata platform, there will
always be communities that will not integrated in wikidata massively... but
that's also a good thing for pluralism. You can't assume that a discrepancy is
always a clue for a mistake (I am sure the examples of your experience are, of
course), on the long term some of them are simply effects of gray areas that
need to wait to be resolved even at the level of the sources. Insome fields,
such as taxonomy, there is some confusion and asymmetric organization of the
content and will never be solved easily. But in the other areas they probably
will.
Alex
Il Domenica 15 Luglio 2018 22:37, Gerard Meijssen
<[email protected]> ha scritto:
Hoi,
Wikidata is a reflection of all the Wikimedia projects, particularly the
Wikipedias. Both Wikidata and Wikipedia are secondary sources and when two
Wikipedias have opposing information on singular information, it is a cop
out to state both "opinions" on Wikidata and leave it at that.
Given that Wikidata largely reflects what a Wikipedia indicates, it is
important to curate such differences. The first thing to consider is are we
interested at all in knowing about "false facts" and then how we can
indicate differences to our editing and reading community.
I have been editing about Africa for a long time now and I find that the
content about Africa is woefully underdeveloped. Best Wikipedia practice
has it that cities and villages are linked to "administrative territorial
entities" like provinces and districts and I have added such relations from
primary to secondary entities. Adding such information to villages and
cities as well is too much for me. The basic principle is that I am being
bold in doing so. I do relate to existing items and I have curated a lot of
crap data so far. The result is that Wikidata in places differs
considerably from Wikipedias, particularly the English Wikipedia.
As topics like the ones about Africa are severely underdeveloped, just
adding new data is a 100% improvement even when arguably adding sources is
a good thing. By being bold, by starting from a Wikipedia as a base line,
it is important to note that not adding sources is established practice in
Wikidata.
The issue I raise is that when "another" Wikipedia considers its
information superior, it is all too easy to make accusations of adding
"fake facts" particularly when it is not obvious that the "other" Wikipedia
provides better information. To counter such insular behaviour, it becomes
relevant to consider how we can indicate discrepancies between stated facts
in any Wikimedia project vis a vis Wikidata. Obviously it would be
wonderful when the total of all our projects are considered in a
visualisation.
Particularly when a subject is of little interest to our current editor
community, the data in the Wikipedias and by inference in Wikidata is weak.
Many of the subjects, Africa just as one example, are relevant to a public,
both a reading and editing public, that we want to develop. Without tools
that help us curate our differences we will rely on insular opinions and
every project is only a part of what we aim to achieve in all our projects.
We will have a hard time growing our audience.
NB this is an old, old issue and it is not going away.
Thanks,
GerardM
https://ultimategerardm. blogspot.com/2016/01/ wikipedia-lowest-hanging-
fruit-from.html
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