Both of those are very good points. I am no expert on Wikidata so I'm unqualified to assess how much weight to give those concerns.
I do wonder if it would be better to focus on encouraging more mobile app users to become Wikipedia and/or Commons contibutors instead of Wikidata contributors. Thoughts? Pine On Mar 22, 2015 8:57 AM, "Dmitry Brant" <[email protected]> wrote: > In preparation for next week's quarterly planning, I'd like to restate > some of my concerns regarding Wikidata descriptions and flesh them out more > comprehensively, since we're featuring them more prominently in the > upcoming quarter. > (n.b. These are more like "devil's advocate" thoughts, lest I make it > sound like the Apps team isn't unified in its vision, which it certainly > is.) > > My reservations fall under two categories: > > == Philosophical == > > Wikidata is a superbly valuable repository of *data* -- data that a > machine can use to generate all kinds of results that us humans can > consume. The "description" field, on the other hand, is the only thing that > is *not* data, and is not usable by a machine in any way. > > To allow users to manually fill in the Wikidata description (i.e. to > manually duplicate the contents of Wikipedia) is to miss the point of the > true potential of Wikidata, which is to be able to *use* the data to > generate the description automatically! > > Of course the counterargument to this is that the current state of > auto-generated descriptions is not quite good (they often sound strange or > nonsensical), but that's only because the tools we have at our disposal for > generating descriptions are still in their infancy. I don't deny that this > will be a hard problem to solve, but in my view, this is ultimately the > *correct* problem to solve. > > The other thing (a more obvious one) that makes Wikidata descriptions > redundant is the first sentence of every Wikipedia article which, on its > own, is intended to provide a concise description of the article (and many > articles already do this with rather good consistency). In fact, as we > speak, we're working on programmatically "cleaning up" the first sentence > to make it even more concise. Why not simply use this as the description? > > Is the first sentence sometimes too long to be a good description? No > problem: create a markup annotation that will denote the *portion* of the > first sentence that will serve as the description. In any case, making > users manually copy the content from the first sentence (which is from > where most of the current Wikidata descriptions appear to be derived) seems > extraordinarily unnecessary. On top of all that, it creates an unnecessary > synchronization cost, fulfillable only by a human contributor, between the > two sources of data. > > So, what I mean to say is: every edit to the Wikidata description is a > missed opportunity to edit the Wikipedia article in such a way that the > description could be auto-generated correctly. (or, similarly, a missed > opportunity to edit the *data* of the Wikidata entry in such a way that the > description could be auto-generated correctly) > > == Practical == > > If we open the floodgates to editing the Wikidata description (i.e. if we > make it too easy to edit the description), I predict that we'll be very > disappointed by the quality of the contributions we'll get. I can see it > quickly devolving into a whole lot of noise, spam, and vandalism. > > This means that we would need to implement the same kind of > moderation/administration schemes that currently exist on Wikipedia > itself. I'm by no means qualified to speak for the Community, but I doubt > that many Wikipedians will want to double their workload by having to > "watch" the Wikidata description of their favorite articles, in addition to > the articles themselves. > > I'll also point out that we do not yet expose any administrative > mechanisms in the mobile apps. This means that users will routinely see > their edits disappear or be reverted without any notification or > explanation. This is already the case for the general editing of article > content in the apps, but since the description is featured much more > prominently, any edits (or reverts) to it will be much more noticeable, and > will surely add to the confusion and frustration. > If we really want to get it right, we have to figure this out before > proceeding. > > > -Dmitry > > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > >
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