On 5 April 2013 22:24, phoebe ayers <phoebe.w...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On 5 April 2013 19:07, Lydia Pintscher <lydia.pintsc...@wikimedia.de> > > wrote: > > > > > On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 1:00 AM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > > > > Sorry, I don't know what this means. I thought Wikidata was already > > > > deployed to the English Wikipedia (and possibly other projects as > > well). > > > > > > I've posted an announcement with more details on the technical village > > > pump at > > > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Wikidata_phase_2_is_coming_soon > > > Let me know if anything is still unclear so I can clarify. > > > > > > > > > Cheers > > > Lydia > > > > > > > > > > Lydia, could you please point me to the discussion on *English Wikipedia* > > where the community indicated an interest in deploying this software? > > Infoboxes and sourcing to another website completely outside the control > of > > English Wikipedia is a rather big issue, and I would expect to see a > > Request for Comment with at least 200-300 participants. > > > > Risker/Anne > > > > In my opinion, as a casual Wikidata editor and not-so-casual Wikipedia > editor, I think the Commons analogy continues to hold up pretty well. > Commons exists. We can use it, as a project. We don't *have* to (and indeed > don't always, on en:wp, where fair use images are accepted). As I > understand it, the same is true with Wikidata -- it will be around, if and > when it seems appropriate to use. Of course Commons and Wikidata will both > be more useful and more awesome the more projects do use them. But my very > non-technical understanding of this deployment is that basically we made > the projects able to see that Wikidata exists (correct me if I'm wrong!) > > Now as far as I can tell there's a whole lot of work yet to do in order to > figure out how exactly one might link to data or produce an infobox and > what that might look like -- deployment does not seem to mean ready for > prime-time, yet -- and of course the data-building itself is just barely > getting started. Best practices for infoboxes does seem like a project-wide > RFC to me. But hopefully, when we get to that point, wikidata will be a > useful option. > > Well, the problem is that we *are* at that point now. Wikidata II *is* intended to be used in infoboxes. We already have edit skirmishes happening all over the project with people adding infoboxes where they aren't wanted, explicitly to take advantage of wikidata, and using wikidata as their excuse to bring it in. Load it up, okay. But don't turn it on until the community discusses whether or not it wants it turned on. It's simply contemptuous of the community to do that. You know as well as I do that as soon as a feature is available, it's used by some people who will fight to the death to keep using it, whether or not it is what the community wants. (See revision deletion which, as soon as it was turned on for administrators on English Wikipedia before the process had been worked out, immediately resulted in tens of thousands of inappropriate revision deletions in its first week. Even now, at least 30% of revision deletions are inappropriate.) You want to keep editors, you need to actually make sure that the changes you are adding are what they want, not what they'll leave over.
I disagree that the Commons analogy holds up. Commons is very active, and easily accessible, and it's pretty obvious how to remove unwanted images/media. It is *not* obvious how to remove wikidata, and it is a site that is extremely not user friendly (I've checked, and even got someone to give me a tour, and it makes wikitext look simple). There is a rather big difference between images to articles, which aren't essential but are very complementary, and the information contained in an article. We know for a fact that there are many different versions of even supposedly factual data (dates of birth for well-known people, names of battles, Gdansk/Danzig, etc). In many cases, there has been a careful and sometimes very delicate consensus reached by local editors to address these variations. Now we will have infoboxes with one version and the actual article saying something else - and the information in the infobox will be outside of the control of the editors of the article absent going to another site. So now those wars about content will have to go to two sites at once, one of which will be international. So that means users who have never logged into Wikipedia will have the ability to control the content of the project. Let's not put this in place until the community decides whether or not it wants it. Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
