Andreas Kolbe has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006. He is a member of the Signpost's editorial board. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.
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@ Andreas Kolbe, Thanks for an excellent article highlighting the pitfalls in Wikidata policies.Hope to see the foundation act on the issues. --Arjunaraoc (talk) 03:05, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
"Strong and explicit disclaimers" is, in practice, a joke, since I'm pretty sure if you took a random sample of visitors to Wikimedia projects 99% would be unaware that the disclaimers exist. From what I've read anecdotally, a sizable number of people think there's a paid staff that writes Wikipedia, or that the Foundation has editorial control over the projects. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 03:46, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@ Andreas Kolbe Thank you for an enlightening article. Especially significant: the loss of provenance (verifiability) due to clear violations of Wikipedia's generous but restrictive licensing terms, e.g., importing Wikipedia's CC BY-SA 3.0 licensed content (not facts, but claims of fact) without required attribution directly into Wikidata under the permissive CCO public domain dedication. A great investment for Google and Microsoft, which have the financial means and technical infrastructure to continually analyze, refine, and commercially exploit Wikidata's now totally free crowd-sourced claims of fact without any community responsibilities whatsoever — other than those due to their shareholders. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 05:15, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As for quality, I'm worried about lack of references as mentioned above. But I'm also worried about corporate bias -Google and Microsoft are mentioned- as I do not bite the hand that feeds me (so I never ever edit about the company I work for, my personal policy).
But as for data validation by users, that's a different case. I do not trust any statement based on a single unknown source. An extreme case, my mother (a female) was studying Medicine in 1960. The local census for her home town shows that the number of female university students in that place in 1960 was zero. The census is obviously wrong. Does it mean that cesuses are always wrong? No, in fact they are mostly right. But they can be wrong. And a Spanish census is a quite well done official source of information. So if I-don't-know-who says that an avocado is a kind of Nepalese oceangoing vessel... well, I should double check. In wiki and out of wiki, pre-wiki, post-wiki, inter-wiki.
Is information neutral? Are data? Not really, based on our own experience in life. We are just used to live in this kind of context. I know that saying Myanmar or Burma, Alboraya or Alboraia, football or soccer, are non-neutral decisions, we know what to expect from texts making such word use and we evaluate them accordingly. It is experience and prudence, the same things that keep us from being run by a car when we cross the street. B25es (talk) 07:03, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
factcomment alreadyinfectedpopulated Wikidata? Widefox; talk 13:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]A letter to Andreas
Andreas,
I understand that this is an opinion piece, and not an article written based on actual research, but I am still disappointed by the fact that you, although we were in an active discussion last week, did not spend the time on actually counterchecking your conjectures with me or anyone else. Independently of whether this article raises some important questions or not - and I think it does, but they are well buried in a long and meandering prose - it contains plenty of falsehoods, which could have easily been dispelled by simply asking. Since you, Andreas, are on the Editorial Board of the Signpost, I don't assume that there is anything that can be done in order to ensure any basic fact-checking or vetting for critical pieces like this one, although I think it would be a display of respect and decency towards our volunteer-lead projects.
To name just a few of the obvious falsehoods:
There are many more issues, but I'll leave it at that for now.
I welcome a critical piece - in particular when it touches upon important problems. I think there has to be a proper conversation about those, and some of these issues need to be made more explicit, in order to find solutions for them in a wider societal context. But the way you present them here - buried and mixed with a number of conspiracy theories and a dismissive, unrespectful tone towards a volunteer-driven project - I simply don't think that this is a good or even effective way to start this conversation. This is similar to the way Mark Graham keeps writing about these issues: I think it is extremely unfortunate that his latest piece in Slate was buried in comments about his unfortunate choice of example, and that this entirely overshadowed his message - a message that I indeed consider important, as I have told Mark repeatedly.
So, to make it very explicit: I welcome critical articles on myself and my work. I was available and reachable to answer questions beforehand, in order to ensure that basic, and often merely tangential, errors are avoided, which might distract from the substantial points. I don't expect you or anyone to simply believe what I say, but I would have at least expected, and hoped for, a chance to explain myself, offer my memories of events, talk about these issues, and maybe point to a few things that you have missed. I would have expected this basic respect from someone who is collaborating with me on Wikimedia and has the same goal. I am saddened by the fact that instead you choose to call one of our projects nonsense, to insinuate that I have participated in a conspiracy in order to weaken our projects, and that, instead of helping to fix the issues on Wikidata, you write about them outside of the project. If you think that by bashing Wikimedia projects on The Register, on Wikipediocracy, or on sister projects is the most effective way to correct them, then I have to admit that I disagree.
In your header you promise to "suggest corrective action". Unfortunately, you seem to have forgotten about this by the end of the article. But I guess it was too much to hope that you would keep your own promise of a constructive contribution. --denny vrandečić (talk) 05:50, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
, which is a quite bizarre statement to make. I can only interpret it as indicative of the fact that you have only made very limited content contributions to this project. I am the first to admit that Wikipedia has its own problems, but to believe that 90% of all claims in Wikipedia are unreferenced shows that you are out of touch with sourcing practices in Wikipedia.Actually, after clicking random article a couple of dozen times, I'd like to concede that you are probably correct on this point. I made you aware that per WP:LEADCITE, facts are sourced in the main body of an article rather than the lead, told you that I thought it was vital for Wikidata content to be referenced to external sources, and expressed my concern that unreliable content in Wikidata would be spread far and wide on the Internet, including by Google. You didn't respond.References to scholarly sources
Saw this only now and would like to point out that WikiProject Source MetaData is working on a system that would facilitate adding scholarly references to statements in Wikidata. In parallel, the Open Access Signalling project works towards importing the full text of openly licensed articles into Wikisource, which would eventually allow statements in Wikipedia, Wikidata or elsewhere to be supported by deeplinking to the precise statement in the Wikisource copy of the scholarly article, thereby helping WP:V. Both projects would welcome additional contributors. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:50, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Circular sourcing with images
As, ahem, illustration to the problem, there are now several new files on commons that give as a source: wikiwand [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14]. But, Wikiwand is just a mirror of Wikipedias! (aka "software interface developed for viewing Wikipedia articles" ^^) And now this is given as the source?!? These are uploads in november and december 2015, and if you look at their traffic [15][16], their traffic is driven by search and the problem is getting bigger over time. Crap. --Atlasowa (talk) 20:42, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
there was another one
thanks andreas, there was another one: Nam Nguyễn Thành. fascinating that there are bots to create, but not to remove :) --ThurnerRupert (talk) 06:11, 14 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]