Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-08-30/Special report

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• OMG after multiple attempts to understand by reading their tutorial, now I finally understand what the heck Wikidata is trying to do. They should put this on their main page. Thank you! —valereee (talk) 17:49, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
• Great article! Wikidata isn't something that interests me personally but it adds a lot of value to what we do here! Ganesha811 (talk) 18:12, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
• It seems dishonest to survey Wikidata and its connections to Wikipedia in this purely promotional way, without mentioning the debate over Wikidata's weaker sourcing standards (especially for biographies of living people) and what appears to be a general consensus on en.Wikipedia that this difference in standards makes Wikidata content unacceptable for direct use in en.Wikipedia articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:54, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
  • @David Eppstein: No it is not dishonest, perhaps the author is not aware of the "general consensus" because she edits mainly on deWiki. To tell the truth I'm aware of some dissatisfaction with weaker sourcing standards (I have some of this myself) and several times I've been perplexed about "how can I remove this from the infobox." But I'm not aware of a "general consensus". If you can make the case for a "GC" feel free to submit a piece for The Signpost and we'll very likely publish it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:25, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @Smallbones: I believe there was a large kerfuffle at an RFC last year or so about this issue, where a large group of editors basically asserted enWP's right to keep Wikidata material from being transcluded here. -Indy beetle (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
      • You are referring to Wikipedia:Wikidata/2018 Infobox RfC? ☆ Bri (talk) 23:07, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
        • That's a difficult RFC to even skim, but I can't say I see a consensus. About 30% were dead set against any use of Wikidata as far as I can see. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
          • Perhaps I overstated the general sentiment. But if you find and read the close, you'll see "This was what the closers thought at first. ... there is a consensus on one point: if Wikipedia wants to use data from Wikidata, there needs to be clear assurances on the reliability of this data." —David Eppstein (talk) 01:20, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
            • One stuff has always been true : Wikidatans and Wikipedians are on the same boat on that matter. Wikidatans by alone cannot really make an enormous job on data and data quality item by item, statement by statement, without the Wikipedia communities. These « assurances on the reliability of this data » is actually the same as in Wikipedia : the communities and their involvement. So basically, if enwiki wants to use the data, they will get the same reliability as they have on their own project because this will be the same datas, actually. No border. Policies are fine, but without the people to enforce them or go beyond they are worthless. TomT0m (talk) 15:09, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Sourcing standards probably vary on different language Wikipedias, so it would be hard for Wikidata to adopt them. Have you considered that maybe the English Wikipedia standards are overly strict, and reject at lot of perfectly good information just because it come from the wrong place? If somebody reveals their date of birth in a CV, perhaps Wikipedia would reject it because it's a primary source closely associated with that person. But when a journalist copies the date from the CV and it's published on a web article, it's now "blessed" and suitable for inclusion. Yet details like dates of birth for living people are sometimes poorly sourced in Wikipedia, added by an anonymous editor and no reference is ever added. Wikidata may end up with the same statement, marked as "imported from Wikipedia", but which can't be verified anywhere else. Remember also the instance where Donna Strickland had the first version of her article deleted, among other things because although she was the president of the Optical Society, the editor decided that the Optical Society's website wasn't an independent source to verify that information, because Strickland was its president? ghouston (talk) 23:47, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
      • Perhaps before writing argumentative comments you should inform yourself of the policies you discuss? WP:BLPSELFPUB allows a birthdate to be sourced from a cv. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:10, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
        • Point taken, that's a decent policy. ghouston (talk) 00:14, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • On en.Wikipedia itself there's no requirement to source claims and plenty of claims go uncited. However if there's a citation en.Wikipedia policy is that it's essentially a qualitative value judgement whether or not the citation is good enough to be included in en.Wikipedia. Given that this is currently a qualitative value judgement it's impossible to have an automated process that checks whether or not a given citation meets en.Wikipedia standards or doesn't.

Given the way the system is setup at the moment when importing claim it's possible to set the infobox to only import claims with citations that don't come from Wikimedia projects. If there would be more precise definitions of what makes a valid source that aren't depended on human value judgements we could have a more complex whitelisting or blacklisting system for what claims can be imported via the infobox.

As far as qualitative value judgements go, for biographies of living people Wikidata now has https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Living_people which allows deletion of claims qualitatively judged to be badly sourced. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

• In addition to the above, I know this article wasn't written just for the English Wikipedia context, but ... we try to use local short descriptions here, not those from Wikidata, partially due to vandalism concerns. For example I recently discovered by accident that on Wikidata, macaroni and cheese was known in English as "Tu culo en vinagre" (Spanish for "your butt in vinegar") for more than two months. Graham87 06:57, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
  • With the coming of the Wikidata bridge, problems like that might not be such an issue in the future, as it will allow direct Wikidata editing from the comfort of your local wiki. ~★ nmaia ^d 07:35, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

@NMaia: The Wikidata bridge doesn't help with any issue discussed above. It won't change labels of items. It doesn't deal with sourcing standards and even the fact that it should be able to enter source isn't build into the prototype that exists currently (but hopefully before the bridge get into contact with the bigger Wikis). ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:47, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Not in its first iteration, but technically there wouldn't be any hurdles for that to happen in the future. As for sourcing, neither I nor the person I was replying to were talking about that. But if you must, I think the sourcing point is moot since you can set up infoboxes to only fetch statements with references, and many language editions already do that. ~★ nmaia ^d 04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

To have an integrated system to add sources, we requires phab:T199197.--GZWDer (talk) 08:07, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

@Nmaia:, but presumably that would only tell us that something had been given as a source. That source might meet lower WD requirements but not en-wiki's (say, not a secondary source where one was needed) Nosebagbear (talk) 19:04, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

I think this is a shame and a big failure on the WMF developers' side because short descriptions would be the number two thing I would think Wikidata useful for on WMF projects, after inter-language links (which the article mentions and is quite correct about the utility of). It should not be this long after Wikidata was started that we neither have an option to view Wikidata item changes on our en.wiki watchlists (if we opt to) nor the option to watchlist one particular element of a Wikidata item (in this case, the English description). — Bilorv (talk) 08:31, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if part of the problem is lack of information flow between the projects. For the short descriptions example, it'd be good to have the option to also be alerted in a WP (or cross-wiki) watchlist when just the description section of the associated WD item is edited, and to be able to edit the description section of a WD item from the visualeditor interface of a WP page. Similarly, a slight interface improvement for WD-powered infoboxes would be that when editing the WP page in VE, the relevant WD statements could be edited through the same template parameter editing box to allow editing of WD statements via the same interface as editing. Possible the same for the WD cite_Q template. The way we handle commons on WP is similarly odd sometimes, where the local page for File:xyz.png seems to usually be a redundant copy of its commons version. On commons it's then not possible to get a list of all the captions used for it from different pages. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 00:53, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

A short description is not (just) data, it is content. Consider that any given short description refers to the specific article in the specific Wikipedia in the language of that Wikipedia. The closest equivalent in another Wikipedia should describe the article in that Wikipedia in the language of that Wikipedia, which in the general case may be different. It makes plenty of sense to record the short descriptions from all Wikipedias in Wikidata, but not to source them from Wikidata, as they should be written by the people who write the articles, and who know what the articles are actually about, and preferably are sufficiently competent in the language used and sufficiently knowledgeable to write an adequate short description (not always easy, as some articles have a very poorly written lead section). The appropriate short description may change as the article changes, or as an editor of the article sees a better way to express it. It is also inherently sourced to the article itself as an editorial judgment by a Wikipedian. The labels on Wikidata are unsourced and their provenance is obscure. They may be fit for Wikidata purposes, but have been found unfit for English Wikipedia purposes. I do not presume to speak for other Wikipedias. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:36, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

I think we can tease out something very interesting from this comparison to Commons. When I take a Commons picture of an oboe and put it in the article Oboe with the caption "A 20th century oboe", where is the reliable source for that? When our internal search engine takes the short description from Wikidata and displays it underneath the article title, where is the reliable source for that? Are these two scenarios different in a key way, which could explain the different community response to them, or similar in a key way, such that the community response to them is based more in the context of Wikipedia's history (Commons is old and uncontroversial; Wikidata is new and unfamiliar) than it is the actual content? — Bilorv (talk) 19:21, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

I still think this is mostly an enwp issue, not a Wikidata one. If enwp had just decided to display short descriptions on desktop view, this whole issue could have been avoided. You can already watch changes to descriptions on the enwp watchlist, just turn on the display of Wikidata edits. Changing wikis to edit content shouldn't be a big deal nowadays (I'm constantly jumping between enwp/wikidata/commons + other language versions, it's not a big deal). Also, reminder that Commons uses around 3 million English short descriptions from Wikidata that are now out of sync with enwp's. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:30, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

(ec) I tried to bring this argument a couple of years ago, when Wikidata discussions were on their peak, but nobody was interested in listening. At best they would say that the Commons policies are more strict that those at the English Wikipedia, and we do not have to worry - which is completely irrelevant to the argument.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:32, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Bilorv, they're different inasmuch as you can remove or change a Commons picture in a Wikipedia article without having to leave Wikipedia, whereas to change the short description you have to go to a different project (which has a relatively steep learning curve).

A Commons picture appears in a Wikipedia article by dint of Wikipedia mark-up editors here control. The short description, on the other hand, appears in Wikipedia because of content in another project that the editors of that project control.

Moreover, if someone changes the image you put in a Wikipedia article, you can see that in the edit history of the Wikipedia article, and if you have the Wikipedia article watchlisted, it will be flagged to you. This is not so with the short descriptions.

A Commons equivalent would be if someone were to replace image file "oboe.jpg" in Commons, showing an oboe, with an identically named image file showing a different oboe – or a trombone, for that matter. Now, that sort of thing rarely happens in Commons, but is an everyday occurrence with verbal descriptions in Wikidata. Those are some of the differences. --Andreas JN466 14:12, 15 September 2020 (UTC)