I agree with Monte Hurd and would add that my personal volunteer time on Wiki projects, though unique, is not irreplaceable, and the idea that I and others interested in my area of editing could be "overworked" by some new technology is just silly. I think you need to have a little faith in the whole concept of crowd-sourcing. It really does seem to work. Automated descriptions sounds like a terrible idea and I have seen time and again on all sorts of subjects that the main claim to fame switches across languages. An example is a language -pedia that has added a town because it is the location of a castle that is notable in that language -pedia for whatever reason, while in the language -pedia of the town itself, the town may be better known as a hub on a railway network or some such thing.
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 8:08 PM, Monte Hurd <[email protected]> wrote: > Responses inline... > > > > > On Mar 22, 2015, at 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! > > > > > I disagree with the premise that the description being "data" means it is > missing its promise if it is human curated. I am more concerned with the > quality of the description. > > > > > > 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. > > > > > > It's surprisingly hard to create auto generated descriptions that rival > the quality of user generated descriptions. > > Deeply hard, in fact, because it's complicated not only by language syntax > and grammatical rules, but also by qualitative factors (readability, > meaning, context, relevance etc). > > This already complicated situation then becomes many orders of magnitude > more difficult because these qualitative factors can differ between > languages. > > > > > > > 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. > > > The description needs to be able to be shorter than the first sentence in > the article. > > > > > > 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. > > > > > > I predict this won't be any worse than what happened when we enabled > section editing. > > > > > > 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. > > > > > I've been editing descriptions from the Wikidata site directly for months > and only one, of dozens I've added or edited were reverted. > > > > > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l >
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