Hoi,
Wikidata is very much a working database. Its relevance is exactly
because of this. Without the connection to the interwiki links, it would
not be the same, it would not have the coverage and it would not have the
same sized community.
Considerations about secondary use are secondary. Yes, people may use it
for their own purposes and when it fits their needs, well and good. When it
does not, that is fine too. As it is, we do have all kind of Wiki junk in
there. We have disambiguation pages, list articles, templates, categories.
The challenge is to find a use for them.
When I add statements based on categories, I document many categories
[1]. As a result over 900 items for categories will show the result of a
query in the Reasonator. The results is what I think a category could
contain given the subject of a category. For Wikipedians they are articles
not categorised, red links and blue links.
There are several reasons why this is not (yet) a perfect fit. The most
obvious one is including articles that are not part of the selection eg a
list in a category full of humans. Currently not everything can be
expressed in a way that allows Reasonator to pick things up in a query..
dates come to mind. Then there are the categories that have an arbitrary
set of entries.
I am not going to speculate on what kind of qualifiers Commons will come up
with. In essence when you can sort it / select it Wikidata will do a better
job for you. The only thing we have to do is identify the items that fit
the mold. This is something that you can often find the basis for in
existing categories.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2014/08/wikidata-my-workflow-enriching-wikidata.html
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/autolist.html?q=CLAIM%5B31%3A4167836%5D%20AND%20CLAIM%5B360%3A5%5D%20
On 1 September 2014 00:42, James Heald j.he...@ucl.ac.uk wrote:
Hi everybody,
Sorry to open up an old thread again after ten days, but there were some
things in Lydia's reply below that I wanted to come back to.
So, first, a couple of examples of the kind of Commons Categories I had in
mind:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_released_
by_British_Library_Images_Online
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Metropolitan_
Improvements_%281828%29_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd
Despite their names, both these cats effectively identify images from
particular photosets on Flickr. The first category relates to a particular
set of images released by a particular institution on a particular date.
The second relates to a particular set of scans from a particular edition
of a particular book. Both (IMO) would (and, moreover *should*) currently
fail Wikidata:Notability.
The book, and even the edition, might be notable. But a particular set of
scans surely would not. Similarly, the first category is really just a
photoset from Flickr, again something that wouldn't currently get a
Wikidata Q-number.
Now in the email below, Lydia effectively said: no problem, just give each
Commons Category a Wikidata Q-number anyway. (Imho they should be on
Wikidata. I fear if we introduce another layer it'll be considerably harder
to use and maintain.)
GerardM, in sessions at Wikimania, also argued strongly simply for putting
everything in Wikidata.
But I think this would be a mistake, because IMO Wikidata:Notability is a
positive virtue, which should be defended. It is *useful* to people that
they can download a dump of Wikidata for their own purposes, and get
real-world relevant items, rather than the dump being bloated with wiki
junk.
So in my opinion, Commons categories should generally *not* get Q-numbers
on Wikidata (unless they pass WD:N), but should instead get items on the
Commons Wikibase which is being created expressly for the purpose of
holding structured data on things which really only have a commonswiki
significance, and are not real-world notable.
A second point relates to Magnus's issue about how much of this could be
replaced by queries.
Yes, if one were progressively building up a topic search on images from
books in the 1-million image BL Mechanical Curator release, one might ask
for books about London, then books published in a particular date range.
But within that, the natural query to specify scans from this particular
copy of 'Metropolitan Improvements' is the image's membership of this
particular set -- membership of the set in itself is something that should
be queryable, and such a query is the kind of query that, at the right
stage, should be offerable to the user trying to refine their search.
In fact, most current Commons categories will not be WD-notable. But even
for the most egregious of Commons intersection categories, IMO it will
still be worth the Commons Wikibase tracking category membership for an
image, not least for the ability that will give to easily present the
category's files in different ways -- eg perhaps
