Hi Jane,

I'm really sorry if my naïve comment made you sad. :/ To be clearer, I
never wanted to minimize the contribution of the volunteers! It's just that
I still don't know the internal mechanics of Wikidata. I recently read in a
paper, already a bit old*, that 90% of editions were made by bots. I just
thought that the mapping between the Wikipedia editions and Wikidata was
part of these 90% automated tasks, after which the volunteers had to add
the missing 10%, correct and enrich the automatic operations, etc. I'm
sorry if I misunderstood.

** " Wikidata has grown significantly since its launch in October 2012; see
the table here for key facts about its current content. It has also become
the most edited Wikimedia project, with 150– 500 edits per minute, or a
half million per day, about three times as many as the English Wikipedia.
Approximately 90% of these edits are made by bots contributors create for
automating tasks, yet almost one million edits per month are still made by
humans."* (VRANDEČIĆ, Denny et KRÖTZSCH, Markus. Wikidata: a free
collaborative knowledgebase. *Communications of the ACM*, 2014, vol. 57, no
10, p. 78-85.)

2017-09-02 14:42 GMT+02:00 Ed Summers <[email protected]>:

>
> > On Sep 2, 2017, at 7:47 AM, Jane Darnell <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Your note really made me feel so sad. I try to motivate my Wikipedian
> friends into doing more on Wikidata and each time they react the way you
> did, with a sentence like "I imagined that the mapping between Wikipedia
> and Wikidata was ultra-automated." I guess there is something about the
> "data" word in the same that makes people assume it is technical, or that
> being "machine-readable" makes it impossible for humans to read and without
> "bot" knowlege, there is no place for "normal contributors" to help out.
>
> I appreciate this perspective a great deal. I think it's great that you
> are motivating users to edit Wikidata--it's really important. Wikidata is
> nothing (IMHO) without the human-in-the-loop.
>
> But as a practical matter wouldn't it be useful if there were stubs in
> Wikidata that would help editors identify which entities need attention? Or
> would the vastness of it cause a problem?
>
> I can certainly see an argument for an embargo period to give
> counter-vandalism efforts a chance to triage the new pages. But after that
> point wouldn't it be useful if a bot monitored the language wikipedias for
> new entries and then added them to Wikidata so that people could fill them
> out?
>
> I'm just throwing ideas around here, and am not trying to be critical of
> the current state of affairs. You all are doing amazing work.
>
> //Ed
>
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