Hoi,
There is also the age old conundrum where some want to enforce their rules
for the good all all because (argument of the day follows).
First of all, Wikidata is very much a child of Wikipedia. It has its own
structures and people have endeavoured to build those same structures in
Wikidata never mind that it is a very different medium and never mind that
there are 280+ Wikipedias that might consider things to be different. The
start of Wikidata was also an auspicious occasion where it was thought to
be OK to adopt an external German authority. That proved to be a disaster
and there are still residues of this awful decision. It took not long to
show the short comings of this schedule and it was replaced by something
more sensible.
However, we got something really Wiki and it was all too wild. It took not
long for me to ask for someone to explain the current structures and nobody
volunteered. So I did what I do best, I largely ignored the results of the
classes and subclasses. It does not work for me. It works against me so me
current strategy is to ignore this nonsense and concentrate on including
data. The reason is simple; once data is included, it is easy to slice it
and dice it.structure it as we see fit at a later date.
So when our priority becomes to make our data reusable, more open we should
agree on it. So far we have not because we choose to fight each other. Some
have ideas, some have invested too much in what we have at this time. When
we are to make our data reusable, we should agree on what it is exactly we
aim to achieve. Is it to support Commons, it is to support some external
standard that is academically sound. I would always favour what is
practical and easily measured.
I would support Commons first. It has the benefit that it will bring our
communities together in a clear objective. It has the benefit that changes
in the operations of Wikidata support the whole of the Wikimedia universe
and consequentially financial, technical and operational needs and
investments are easily understood. It also means that all the bureaucracy
that has materialised will show to be in the way when it is.
So my question is not if we are a Wiki, my question is are we a Wiki enough
and willing to change our way for our own good.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 at 16:38, Thad Guidry <thadgui...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ettore,
>
> Wikidata has the ability of crowdsourcing...unfortunately, it is not
> effectively utilized.
>
> Its because Wikidata does not yet provide a voting feature on
> statements...where as the vote gets higher...more resistance to change the
> statement is required.
> But that breaks the notion of a "wiki" for some folks.
> And there we circle back to Gerard's age old question of ... should
> Wikidata really be considered a wiki at all for the benefit of society ?
> or should it apply voting/resistance to keep it tidy, factual and less
> messy.
>
> We have the technology to implement voting/resistance on statements. I
> personally would utilize that feature and many others probably would as
> well. Crowdsourcing the low voted facts back to applications like
> OpenRefine, or the recently sent out Survey vote mechanism for spam
> analysis on the low voted statements could highlight where things are
> untidy and implement vote casting to clean them up.
>
> "...the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and it should be
> dismantled if that burden cannot be met..."
>
> -Thad
> +ThadGuidry <https://plus.google.com/+ThadGuidry>
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 2:49 AM Ettore RIZZA <ettoreri...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The Wikidata's ontology is a mess, and I do not see how it could be
>> otherwise. While the creation of new properties is controlled, any fool can
>> decide that a woman <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q467>is no longer a
>> human or is part of family. Maybe I'm a fool too? I wanted to remove the
>> claim that a ship <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11446> is an instance
>> of "ship type" because it produces weird circular inferences in my
>> application; but maybe that makes sense to someone else.
>>
>> There will never be a universal ontology on which everyone agrees. I
>> wonder (sorry to think aloud) if Wikidata should not rather facilitate the
>> use of external classifications. Many external ids are knowledge
>> organization systems (ontologies, thesauri, classifications ...) I dream of
>> a simple query that could search, in Wikidata, "all elements of the same
>> class as 'poodle' according to the classification of imagenet
>> <http://imagenet.stanford.edu/synset?wnid=n02113335>.
>>
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