Hoi,
I have no problem adding information to Wikidata. At the moment they are
districts of Ghana and I am adding new items, adding missing information
like what it is an instance of. I will eventually add the information to
several African Wikipedias, the information will be available as Listeria
boxes. Consequently this information will be easy to adopt.
I totally agree that a bigger community involved in any subject may make a
difference. One great example where we make that difference, where it is
acknowledged that there is an issue is the gender gap. I can make a
difference improving the coverage of Africa but it only makes a difference
when this data is used. Hence, copying the listeria lists to other,
particularly African language Wikipedias and pointing out the extend
information about a subject like African are problematic on ANY Wikipedia.
There is no project big enough or its support for Africa is easily seen as
insufficient.
The community that I seek is not only Engish, French or German. It is first
and foremost Swahili, Xhosa, Igbo, Yoruba and and and... We lack coverage
of any and all subjects that are about Africa. We lack a public both
editing and reading in Africa. We do not have infrastructure in Africa that
makes Wikipedia zippy. We do not raise money in Africa, we do not spend
money in Africa. We need people like Shevon Silva (working on
administrative territorial entities). That work will enable an English
Wikipedia policy of always linking to the lowest level. It is really
important for the African Cinema group to start so that we can share what
they find. Developing Listeria lists is cheap, easily transportable and it
will bring content to wherever it is welcome. I can do that, I can add
information to Wikidata improving lists like this [1] one at a time and so
can you.
The big elephant in the room is quality. When a subject is underdeveloped,
there are situational errors, systemic errors, errors by omission and
errors at entry. Check this query, compare the info from Wikidata with the
data at OpenStreetMap and be glad that we have such queries [2]. But a map
like this, a query like this, should fit in Listeria lists and articles, we
should enable data exploration much more. There is so much more than just
text that is too long to read, images, maps with interactive queries will
make it much more of .
The big elephant in the room is quality. We do not know the differences
between projects, we maintain that "our" Wikipedia is better, that the text
of the other is inconsistent EVEN THOUGH it talks about reforms that have
not been properly entered into the text. You can expect 6% error rate
because of manual entry. When I add Wikipedia data in Wikidata, I will
catch some errors and make some others.. the error rate is at least 6%. We
would catch these errors when we compare. We could do this but we don't.
The big elephant in the room is quality. This is true for the Internet, it
is why a Facebook and Youtube point to us. We could and should do 6% better
for their readers, for our readers. We should do this for Africa. Because I
do not know the capital cities of Africa and so do you. Facts like these we
want to find in Wikipedia and we do not know he capital cities of the
administrative territorial entities because I did not put them there and
many of these places have no article.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GerardM/Subprefectures_of_Guinea
[2]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query#Third-level_administrative_country_subdivision
On 16 July 2018 at 12:56, Alessandro Marchetti <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
> <https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2018/07/africagap-where-wikipedias-collide.html>
> [2] https://ultimategerardm. blogspot.com/2018/07/ africagap-support-for-
> minority-languages.html
> <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
> <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
> <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
> <https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2016/01/wikipedia-lowest-hanging-fruit-from.html>
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