I finally found the time to play extensively with Mix’n’match and it’s by far one of the most promising models I’ve come across for Wikidata growth. A short conversation with Magnus on Twitter got me thinking on how to best preserve the output of costly human curation.[1]
I spent most of my time manually auditing automatically matched entries from the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani [2]. These entries are long, unstructured biographical entries and it takes quite a lot of effort to understand if the two individuals referenced by Wikidata and DBI actually are the same person. This is a great example of a task that’s still pretty hard for a machine to perform, no matter how sophisticated the algorithm. My favorite example? Mix’n’ match suggested a match between Giulio Baldigara (Q1010811 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1010811>) and Giulio Baldigara (DBI <http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giulio-baldigara_(Dizionario_Biografico)/>) which looked totally legitimate: these two individuals are both Italian architects from the 16th century with the same name, they were both born around the same years in the same city, they were both active in Hungary at the same time: strong indication that they are the same person, right? It turns out they are brothers and the full name of the person referenced in Wikidata is Giulio Cesare Baldigara (the least known in a family of architects). I unmatched the suggestion and flagged the DBI entry as non existing in Wikidata. My question at the moment is: the output of a labor-intensive review of a potential match is currently stored as a volatile flag in a tool hosted on labs, but is invisible in Wikidata. Should something happen to Mix’n’match (god forbid) the result of my work would get lost. Which got me thinking: - shouldn’t a manually unmatched item be created directly on Wikidata (after all DBI is all about notable individuals who would easily pass Wikidata’s notability threshold for biographies) - shouldn’t the relation between Giulio (Cesare) Baldigara (Q1010811 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1010811>) and the newly created item for Giulio Baldigara be explicitly represented via a not the same as property, to prevent future humans or machines from accidentally remerging the two items based on some kind of heuristics Thoughts welcome, Dario [1] https://twitter.com/ReaderMeter/status/667214565621432320 <https://twitter.com/ReaderMeter/status/667214565621432320> [2] https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/?mode=catalog&catalog=55&offset=0&show_noq=0&show_autoq=1&show_userq=0&show_na=0 <https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/?mode=catalog&catalog=55&offset=0&show_noq=0&show_autoq=1&show_userq=0&show_na=0>
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