Hi Jane, hi Romaine,
I think we agree that valuable information should be kept if at all
possible. My chief concern is that orphaned items do not have a clear
identity. It's not useful to know that "something" is at a certain
location. The first thing we must determine is what this "thing" is that
we are talking about. Links to Wikipedia are a good way of doing this.
Without them, we need to come up with other identity providing sources.
We certainly have the right infrastructure for this (with all the
identifier properties that point to other databases and authority files).
The first goal of anyone who wants to safe an orphan should be to
connect it with the outside world so as to give it some grounding to
build on.
A weaker way to provide basic grounding is to make internal connections.
There are cases where this is strong (one can identify items as "the
author of War & Peace" or "the mother of Marie Skłodowska-Curie"), but
there are other cases where it is too weak ("the town in Germany" or
"the part of Europe" do not identify anything). One would need to give
this more thought if one wanted to determine automatically if an item
receives its identity from the incoming/outgoing links to other items.
Cheers,
Markus
On 29.05.2015 17:05, Romaine Wiki wrote:
Hi Markus,
Indeed yes, that is also an issue. It can happen with new articles and
with older articles.
Some articles get deleted as they are a duplicate of another article, or
worse written (to bad to keep), or not an encyclopaedic subject to have
in an encyclopaedia.
Every day, on nl-wiki we check new articles if they are connected on
Wikidata. Almost all articles that have a template that marks it as
nominated for deletion we ignore and we do not add them to Wikidata. On
nl-wiki we do this by hand, to make sure all basic statements are added,
but if this is done by bots, you get a situation that they may not check
for templates that mark articles for deletion.
If an deleted item has statements, the question is if this information
is at itself valuable to keep to be used and/or for the future.
Romaine
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