![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | → | Archive 14 |
Thanks to DJ for posting links to the usages of the description field, and the link to Apps short descriptions which in turn contains a link to this phab. That thread is infuriating. Not a thought to consult with the communities where the description field would land but hand-wringing about vandalism to Wikidata. That is one big blow off, of the fundamental deal among the communities. Jytdog ( talk) 20:26, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
OVasileva (WMF), in your edit to the wikidata article descriptions RFC you said we have decided to turn the wikidata descriptions feature off for enwiki for the time being. The RFC was withdrawn on the basis of your statement. I didn't participate at the time, and It's still trying to get up to speed on the situation. However if I understand the situation correctly the only place wikidata descriptions were turned off was for browser-based mobile users. [1] [2] There's clearly no meaningful difference between having it on browser-mobile, app-mobile, or wherever else.
While I understand how these descriptions can be useful, I share the other editor's concerns that it's remote content and we can't control it. Having editors place a pull of content from wikidata to an article is controversial as it is, having the WMF push bulk content from wikidata to wikipedia is rather more problematical. In addition to concerns previously raised by others, I'll like to add additional points really nail down the 'remote content' detail:
I was considering reopening the RFC, but maybe you can just follow up on your statement to turn wikidata descriptions off? Alsee ( talk) 08:14, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
Hello, Thank you for pinging me. First, I would like to apologize for the obvious misunderstanding on the original RfC. The original RfC referred to the "mobile views of en-WP pages". My team understood this to mean the (actual) mobile view, not the individual Wikipedia apps for Android and iOS. We weren’t trying to mislead anyone with our statements. We simply didn’t even consider that the conversation could also pertain to the apps, which are not what we call "the mobile view" and where descriptions have been a part of the feature set for more than two years.
The RfC stemmed from a conversation around potential vandalism on the mobile website, a couple of months after this feature was enabled for the mobile view. Similarly, in our original reply to this conversation, we only considered and addressed the behavior of the mobile website, as seen to our references to the state of the mobile website at the time - positioning of the infobox, tests performed solely on the mobile website, etc.
The Readers team (not just web) are thinking about this very seriously right now and appreciate your concerns. I wanted to address the nature of the misunderstanding while we brainstorm next steps for the future of the feature on the different platforms. We will be posting more updates soon. OVasileva (WMF) ( talk) 18:05, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
A sizeable number of en.WP editors have put considerable time and effort into harmonising the site's formatting and linguistic style. These are set out in WP:MOS, and of particular relevance to Wikidata, WP:MOSNUM and WP:MOSLINK. These guidelines (there are many) have evolved through discussion and debate on the associated talkpages, such as WT:MOS, WT:MOSNUM, and WT:MOSLINK.
en.WP stylistic expectations differ significantly from those of other language-WPs, which (tell me if I'm wrong) are considerably less cohesive in these respects. There are several historical and practical reasons that consistency of style and formatting are taken so seriously on this site. From what I know, Wikidata is being generated by developers and programmers somewhere in the German chapter's Berlin offices. There is utterly no communication by its creators with the en.WP community on matters of style and formatting.
I do not believe any Wikidata outputs should go live without such communication. This is particularly urgent because Wikidata outputs will not, presumably, be editable by the community. We will be stuck with what is cooked up in a Berlin basement by a largely German-speaking crowd that has no specific engagement with our community. Tony (talk) 09:58, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
en
isn't good enough; there's going to have to be en.wikipedia
, simple.wikipedia
, etc., with each different variant of a datum subject to the policies and guidelines of the site to which it pertains. Once you have that, it's unclear what the benefit could be of using WikiData. WD may really be more suited to specific purposes that are mostly tabular data that don't vary by language, like dates of issue of films or automobile models. Even then, it's only going to be useful for the Wikipedias if the sourcing standards of the most stringent one (probably en.wikipedia, though I'm not certain of that) apply to the data. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
11:38, 24 September 2017 (UTC)PS: One potential way to address this would be a Data:
namespace on each project (its name translated as needed) in which the data really lives, subject to that site's policies, including access level that prevent noobs and anons from vandalizing it. WikiData would then import this data and make it available. This would be like a distributed version control system like Git. A user with sufficient access at, say, nl.wikipedia could decide that the en.wikipedia version of a datum is properly sourced per nl's policies, import the en version, translate it (if necessary – it might just be numeric data) and enrich the database with a new nl entry in the same table. No one at WikiData, or any other project, would be able to change the nl.wikipedia data (except maybe a WD admin, to, e.g., fix a coding error or some other technical problem). A site like simple.wikipedia could even have a blanket rule to mirror all en.wikipedia entries with an option to selectively override them locally. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
11:48, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I concur with SMcCandlish and others that have previously mentioned it: It is very difficult to see a way out of this, since when you push to the Wikidata side, you end up with Wikidata doing the Wikipedias work, without a proper physical support, nor the accumulated knowledge, competences and capabilities of the various Wikipedia communities. If you push to the opposite side, you end up with some aberration where the Wikipedias extend into Wikidata, forcing part of their work to be done there, without any gain at all. And anything in the between is an undesirable chimera - nor meat, nor fish - with the worst of both worlds. It seems that what is being proposed here, with the "descriptions" issue, but also with infoboxes, lists and other information being generated straight from Wikidata, and appearing and being presented in a way supposedly "finished for consumption", is indeed a corruption of what Wikidata apparently should be, a raw data source. I believe it's time to stop all those experiments that exceed Wikidata capabilities, and concentrate on what it could be really useful for - See SMcCandlish above, statistical data importation by bots from the original sources (but blocking IP and newbie editorial access to them), and such kind of things which could turn Wikidata into a truly and indisputably useful project, instead of being perceived as an invading pest, as they are now.-- DarwIn ( talk) 12:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I want to second Tony1's call for establishing a space of communication on these issues. I suggesting making it as Wikipedia:Wikiproject Wikidata. Think of it as an embassy for Wikidata material to make sure it's properly sourced and expressed when placed on Wikipedia. And to put RfC before replacing major bits of Wikipedia functionality with Wikidata-sourced variants. There are a lot of benefits for some of this data, but also a lot of valid concerns. Approaches need to be worked out that are understandable and editable from the Wikipedia side. Be bold / Move fast and break things isn't the right approach here.-- Carwil ( talk) 16:00, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
Result:
What have I missed? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 14:42, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
So, as a test, I chose 30 pages from early on in my watchlist and looked at their Wikidata descriptions:
Here's the list:
Wikipedia Article | Wikidata Description | Changed to… |
---|---|---|
0.999... | ![]() |
|
1033 Fez massacre | — | massacre of Jews by the Banu Ifran tribe |
1660 destruction of Safed | — | reported destruction of a Jewish town |
1948 Palestinian exodus | — | mass departure of refugees from Palestine |
1968 Polish political crisis | — | dissident political mobilization, state repression, and anti-Jewish campaign |
1971 May Day Protests | — | mass civil disobedience protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC |
1982 Hama massacre | ![]() |
repression of protest movement by the Syrian government |
1st Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia | — | term of Bolivia's legislature, 2010 to 2015 |
2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt | Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 [redundant, should be null on en.wiki] | unsuccessful military coup attempt in Venezuela |
2003 invasion of Iraq | start of the conflict known as the Iraq War [could be improved] | military invasion led by the United States |
2006 Lebanon War | ![]() |
|
2006 Oaxaca protests | protest [could be improved] | political mobilization demanding the resignation of Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruíz Ortíz |
2006 youth protests in France | — | protest movement opposing changes to labor law |
2008 unrest in Bolivia | — | political crisis between departments demanding autonomy and national government |
2011 Bolivian protests | — | protest mobilization defending the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory |
2014 Israel–Gaza conflict | ![]() |
|
2017 | ![]() |
|
2017 Aleppo suicide car bombing | — | |
2017 Women's March | ![]() |
|
2017 Nangarhar airstrike | on 13 April 2017, a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb was dropped by the United States in the Nangarhar Province of eastern Afghanistan to destroy tunnel complexes used by ISIS [sentence fragment from enwiki lead sentence] | United States attack on tunnel complex with massive bomb |
20 March 2003 anti-war protest | — | coordinated international protests against the US-led Iraq War |
21st century | ![]() |
|
Administrative divisions of Bolivia | [none, but maps to Wikidata item "administrative territorial entity of Bolivia"] [should be null on en.wiki] | |
Adolfo Chávez | Bolivian politician [could be improved] | Bolivian politician and indigenous leader |
African Americans | ethnic group of Americans [could be improved] | racial or ethnic group in the United States with African ancestry |
Agency for the Development of Macroregions and Border Zones | — | Bolivian governmental agency |
Akha people | ethnic group [could be improved] | ethnic group in southeast Asia |
Al-Bireh | city in the West Bank [could be improved] | Palestinian city in the West Bank |
Alain Chartier | French poet [could be improved] | French poet and political writer |
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act | United States law establishing protected areas in Alaska |
None of the descriptions, even the incorrect one, caused any policy-based problems or were the result of vandalism or mischief. Changing the Wikidata descriptions was minimal hassle (although a tool to accomplish this in batch for my watchlist would be great). Cases where a complete description is the same as the title could be rare. So could cases where Wikidata's needs are at variance with the Wikipedia description could be rare as well ("administrative divisions" / "territorial entity" case was the only example here).
Unlike some people who just don't like Wikidata, I'm happy to have my improved descriptions appear on Wikidata. And I think having these descriptions there improves Wikidata (see my comments about being neighborly above), so I hope that whatever solution we come up with enables this kind of editing.-- Carwil ( talk) 17:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
See this example diff where Mike Peel removed all of the infobox content from the page. Not only was there exactly zero benefit in the edit, it trashed the ref in the reflist, it replaced a good recent lead image with an older image partly obscured by banners, and it replaced a useful map with an essentially useless map. Note that trying to view the old version of the page no longer shows most of the damage, because with Wikidata you can't see what was on the page at the time. Changes made at wikidata silently rewrite the history-view of the article here.
The fundamental problem is the pointless and disruptive removal of the infobox content from the page. The fact that the edit did multiple-damage to the article just highlights the blind and disruptive crusade here. The edit didn't even attempt to improve the article, other than the tunnel-vision goal of pushing Wikidata itself. Alsee ( talk) 18:57, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
Bedingung B: Das Einbinden von Wikidata-Daten ist nur zulässig, wenn dazu ein externer Beleg vorhanden istand
Belege. deWiki also have in that "Belege" section a module that appears to transclude the Wikidata citation to dewiki, seems like. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 14:50, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
Aye (paragraph break because of the excessively wide indentation), although they seem to state that some types of vandalism are easier to catch on Wikidata than enwiki. But yeah, reliability concerns are widespread even in that RfC. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 15:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
I think we need to start drafting a guideline. I am going to start doing that over the next week or so (my plate is really full now). It will start as essay; after we get something reasonable we can hold an RfC to have it promoted to a guideline. This will be hard work but we need to establish some principles that can gain wide enough consensus (which will definitely not be unanimous) to hold.
This is much more general than the backward looking stuff about the WMF's overstepping with the description field and should help alleviate surprises and clashes in the future.....
If anybody is aware of an essay that has already been started on this, please point to it.... Jytdog ( talk) 19:42, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Given the increasingly heated recent discussions about Wikidata infoboxes, I think that we need to have an RfC on this topic sooner rather than later. So, taking the plunge, I've started a page at
Wikipedia:Wikidata/2017 RfC draft to draft an RfC specifically on Wikidata usage in infoboxes. It will not cover Wikidata descriptions, or other uses of Wikidata info outside of infoboxes (those would need a separate RfC). I've styled it on
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2, as I think that format (particularly with background info and suggested options) yielded a clear consensus. I suggest that we collaboratively work on this draft for a while before we start the RfC (at least a fortnight, maybe a month or so). To keep the discussion together, I've redirected the talk page here. So, please be bold, but also be neutral, and help draft this. Thanks.
Mike Peel (
talk)
00:36, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
|area=12.3 ha
. In that case, the value entered is what would be used. For some infoboxes, however, if the area
value is empty or missing, the value from Wikidata would be used, if available. The key point is that data entered at enwiki would override Wikidata. Another consideration is that an infobox should limit what it displays. For example, there have been many heated discussions about whether a religion should be displayed in a person's infobox—I believe the current consensus is that such labels should not be displayed but instead should be discussed in the article when appropriate because that would allow clarification of the meaning and significance of the religion for that person. The current wording of option 2 would allow editors to add anything which exists in Wikidata, including religion.
Johnuniq (
talk)
01:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
At present, an editor creating a Wikidata-aware infobox has the following options available to them as documented in Module:WikidataIB:
Other options are available using other Lua modules, for example Module:Wd enables the retrieval of the raw references from Wikidata. Work is in progress (e.g. {{ Cite Q}}) to consolidate the format of references with the CS1/2 styles of citation templates.
I think that commentators ought to be aware of what is possible now, and cognisant of the improvements made to meet users' wishes since the last RfC in 2013. I see no value in re-hashing old chestnuts like "... permit Wikidata inclusion only when there is no existing English Wikipedia data for a specific field in the infobox" because that's nonsensical in absolute terms. The infobox designer doesn't know what fields have existing data in them in different articles. The proper formulation is "... permit Wikidata inclusion in each field of an article's infobox unless that field has locally supplied data", and that's not even debatable. Everybody agrees with that, so why waste electrons on discussing it further? Pretty much the same goes for unreferenced information. Unless it's "sky is blue" obvious, (or self-referential like ICD), nobody is going to be asking infobox designers to display unsourced information in infoboxes. Why do we need to discuss that? Take it as a given, and keep the RfC simple and up-to-date: something along the lines of "Should infoboxes be permitted to import data from Wikidata, as long as local values override Wikidata values and all non-obvious values are sourced?" -- RexxS ( talk) 15:35, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
|onlysourced={{{onlysourced|}}}
to each appropriate field in the infobox design. That will give an editor who is keen on this sort of work a chance to preview an infobox with onlysourced=no to see what fields in Wikidata need sourcing, and hopefully go a little way to improve the lamentable state of sourcing in Wikidata. As an aside, when I want a reality check, I sometimes paste {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}}
into an article and preview the result. It's inevitably depressing. But it can only get better. --
RexxS (
talk)
10:47, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
I made a major revision of the table Options for using Wikidata in infoboxes. Here's a permalink to my proposed version of the table for examination, in case anyone reverts or revises it. I believe issues such as sourcing would have to be addressed independently of that list. Alsee ( talk) 17:57, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | → | Archive 14 |
Thanks to DJ for posting links to the usages of the description field, and the link to Apps short descriptions which in turn contains a link to this phab. That thread is infuriating. Not a thought to consult with the communities where the description field would land but hand-wringing about vandalism to Wikidata. That is one big blow off, of the fundamental deal among the communities. Jytdog ( talk) 20:26, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
OVasileva (WMF), in your edit to the wikidata article descriptions RFC you said we have decided to turn the wikidata descriptions feature off for enwiki for the time being. The RFC was withdrawn on the basis of your statement. I didn't participate at the time, and It's still trying to get up to speed on the situation. However if I understand the situation correctly the only place wikidata descriptions were turned off was for browser-based mobile users. [1] [2] There's clearly no meaningful difference between having it on browser-mobile, app-mobile, or wherever else.
While I understand how these descriptions can be useful, I share the other editor's concerns that it's remote content and we can't control it. Having editors place a pull of content from wikidata to an article is controversial as it is, having the WMF push bulk content from wikidata to wikipedia is rather more problematical. In addition to concerns previously raised by others, I'll like to add additional points really nail down the 'remote content' detail:
I was considering reopening the RFC, but maybe you can just follow up on your statement to turn wikidata descriptions off? Alsee ( talk) 08:14, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
Hello, Thank you for pinging me. First, I would like to apologize for the obvious misunderstanding on the original RfC. The original RfC referred to the "mobile views of en-WP pages". My team understood this to mean the (actual) mobile view, not the individual Wikipedia apps for Android and iOS. We weren’t trying to mislead anyone with our statements. We simply didn’t even consider that the conversation could also pertain to the apps, which are not what we call "the mobile view" and where descriptions have been a part of the feature set for more than two years.
The RfC stemmed from a conversation around potential vandalism on the mobile website, a couple of months after this feature was enabled for the mobile view. Similarly, in our original reply to this conversation, we only considered and addressed the behavior of the mobile website, as seen to our references to the state of the mobile website at the time - positioning of the infobox, tests performed solely on the mobile website, etc.
The Readers team (not just web) are thinking about this very seriously right now and appreciate your concerns. I wanted to address the nature of the misunderstanding while we brainstorm next steps for the future of the feature on the different platforms. We will be posting more updates soon. OVasileva (WMF) ( talk) 18:05, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
A sizeable number of en.WP editors have put considerable time and effort into harmonising the site's formatting and linguistic style. These are set out in WP:MOS, and of particular relevance to Wikidata, WP:MOSNUM and WP:MOSLINK. These guidelines (there are many) have evolved through discussion and debate on the associated talkpages, such as WT:MOS, WT:MOSNUM, and WT:MOSLINK.
en.WP stylistic expectations differ significantly from those of other language-WPs, which (tell me if I'm wrong) are considerably less cohesive in these respects. There are several historical and practical reasons that consistency of style and formatting are taken so seriously on this site. From what I know, Wikidata is being generated by developers and programmers somewhere in the German chapter's Berlin offices. There is utterly no communication by its creators with the en.WP community on matters of style and formatting.
I do not believe any Wikidata outputs should go live without such communication. This is particularly urgent because Wikidata outputs will not, presumably, be editable by the community. We will be stuck with what is cooked up in a Berlin basement by a largely German-speaking crowd that has no specific engagement with our community. Tony (talk) 09:58, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
en
isn't good enough; there's going to have to be en.wikipedia
, simple.wikipedia
, etc., with each different variant of a datum subject to the policies and guidelines of the site to which it pertains. Once you have that, it's unclear what the benefit could be of using WikiData. WD may really be more suited to specific purposes that are mostly tabular data that don't vary by language, like dates of issue of films or automobile models. Even then, it's only going to be useful for the Wikipedias if the sourcing standards of the most stringent one (probably en.wikipedia, though I'm not certain of that) apply to the data. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
11:38, 24 September 2017 (UTC)PS: One potential way to address this would be a Data:
namespace on each project (its name translated as needed) in which the data really lives, subject to that site's policies, including access level that prevent noobs and anons from vandalizing it. WikiData would then import this data and make it available. This would be like a distributed version control system like Git. A user with sufficient access at, say, nl.wikipedia could decide that the en.wikipedia version of a datum is properly sourced per nl's policies, import the en version, translate it (if necessary – it might just be numeric data) and enrich the database with a new nl entry in the same table. No one at WikiData, or any other project, would be able to change the nl.wikipedia data (except maybe a WD admin, to, e.g., fix a coding error or some other technical problem). A site like simple.wikipedia could even have a blanket rule to mirror all en.wikipedia entries with an option to selectively override them locally. —
SMcCandlish ☺
☏
¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼
11:48, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I concur with SMcCandlish and others that have previously mentioned it: It is very difficult to see a way out of this, since when you push to the Wikidata side, you end up with Wikidata doing the Wikipedias work, without a proper physical support, nor the accumulated knowledge, competences and capabilities of the various Wikipedia communities. If you push to the opposite side, you end up with some aberration where the Wikipedias extend into Wikidata, forcing part of their work to be done there, without any gain at all. And anything in the between is an undesirable chimera - nor meat, nor fish - with the worst of both worlds. It seems that what is being proposed here, with the "descriptions" issue, but also with infoboxes, lists and other information being generated straight from Wikidata, and appearing and being presented in a way supposedly "finished for consumption", is indeed a corruption of what Wikidata apparently should be, a raw data source. I believe it's time to stop all those experiments that exceed Wikidata capabilities, and concentrate on what it could be really useful for - See SMcCandlish above, statistical data importation by bots from the original sources (but blocking IP and newbie editorial access to them), and such kind of things which could turn Wikidata into a truly and indisputably useful project, instead of being perceived as an invading pest, as they are now.-- DarwIn ( talk) 12:23, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
I want to second Tony1's call for establishing a space of communication on these issues. I suggesting making it as Wikipedia:Wikiproject Wikidata. Think of it as an embassy for Wikidata material to make sure it's properly sourced and expressed when placed on Wikipedia. And to put RfC before replacing major bits of Wikipedia functionality with Wikidata-sourced variants. There are a lot of benefits for some of this data, but also a lot of valid concerns. Approaches need to be worked out that are understandable and editable from the Wikipedia side. Be bold / Move fast and break things isn't the right approach here.-- Carwil ( talk) 16:00, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
Result:
What have I missed? · · · Peter (Southwood) (talk): 14:42, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
So, as a test, I chose 30 pages from early on in my watchlist and looked at their Wikidata descriptions:
Here's the list:
Wikipedia Article | Wikidata Description | Changed to… |
---|---|---|
0.999... | ![]() |
|
1033 Fez massacre | — | massacre of Jews by the Banu Ifran tribe |
1660 destruction of Safed | — | reported destruction of a Jewish town |
1948 Palestinian exodus | — | mass departure of refugees from Palestine |
1968 Polish political crisis | — | dissident political mobilization, state repression, and anti-Jewish campaign |
1971 May Day Protests | — | mass civil disobedience protest against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC |
1982 Hama massacre | ![]() |
repression of protest movement by the Syrian government |
1st Plurinational Legislative Assembly of Bolivia | — | term of Bolivia's legislature, 2010 to 2015 |
2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt | Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 [redundant, should be null on en.wiki] | unsuccessful military coup attempt in Venezuela |
2003 invasion of Iraq | start of the conflict known as the Iraq War [could be improved] | military invasion led by the United States |
2006 Lebanon War | ![]() |
|
2006 Oaxaca protests | protest [could be improved] | political mobilization demanding the resignation of Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruíz Ortíz |
2006 youth protests in France | — | protest movement opposing changes to labor law |
2008 unrest in Bolivia | — | political crisis between departments demanding autonomy and national government |
2011 Bolivian protests | — | protest mobilization defending the Isiboro-Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory |
2014 Israel–Gaza conflict | ![]() |
|
2017 | ![]() |
|
2017 Aleppo suicide car bombing | — | |
2017 Women's March | ![]() |
|
2017 Nangarhar airstrike | on 13 April 2017, a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb was dropped by the United States in the Nangarhar Province of eastern Afghanistan to destroy tunnel complexes used by ISIS [sentence fragment from enwiki lead sentence] | United States attack on tunnel complex with massive bomb |
20 March 2003 anti-war protest | — | coordinated international protests against the US-led Iraq War |
21st century | ![]() |
|
Administrative divisions of Bolivia | [none, but maps to Wikidata item "administrative territorial entity of Bolivia"] [should be null on en.wiki] | |
Adolfo Chávez | Bolivian politician [could be improved] | Bolivian politician and indigenous leader |
African Americans | ethnic group of Americans [could be improved] | racial or ethnic group in the United States with African ancestry |
Agency for the Development of Macroregions and Border Zones | — | Bolivian governmental agency |
Akha people | ethnic group [could be improved] | ethnic group in southeast Asia |
Al-Bireh | city in the West Bank [could be improved] | Palestinian city in the West Bank |
Alain Chartier | French poet [could be improved] | French poet and political writer |
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act | United States law establishing protected areas in Alaska |
None of the descriptions, even the incorrect one, caused any policy-based problems or were the result of vandalism or mischief. Changing the Wikidata descriptions was minimal hassle (although a tool to accomplish this in batch for my watchlist would be great). Cases where a complete description is the same as the title could be rare. So could cases where Wikidata's needs are at variance with the Wikipedia description could be rare as well ("administrative divisions" / "territorial entity" case was the only example here).
Unlike some people who just don't like Wikidata, I'm happy to have my improved descriptions appear on Wikidata. And I think having these descriptions there improves Wikidata (see my comments about being neighborly above), so I hope that whatever solution we come up with enables this kind of editing.-- Carwil ( talk) 17:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
See this example diff where Mike Peel removed all of the infobox content from the page. Not only was there exactly zero benefit in the edit, it trashed the ref in the reflist, it replaced a good recent lead image with an older image partly obscured by banners, and it replaced a useful map with an essentially useless map. Note that trying to view the old version of the page no longer shows most of the damage, because with Wikidata you can't see what was on the page at the time. Changes made at wikidata silently rewrite the history-view of the article here.
The fundamental problem is the pointless and disruptive removal of the infobox content from the page. The fact that the edit did multiple-damage to the article just highlights the blind and disruptive crusade here. The edit didn't even attempt to improve the article, other than the tunnel-vision goal of pushing Wikidata itself. Alsee ( talk) 18:57, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
Bedingung B: Das Einbinden von Wikidata-Daten ist nur zulässig, wenn dazu ein externer Beleg vorhanden istand
Belege. deWiki also have in that "Belege" section a module that appears to transclude the Wikidata citation to dewiki, seems like. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 14:50, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
Aye (paragraph break because of the excessively wide indentation), although they seem to state that some types of vandalism are easier to catch on Wikidata than enwiki. But yeah, reliability concerns are widespread even in that RfC. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 15:21, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
I think we need to start drafting a guideline. I am going to start doing that over the next week or so (my plate is really full now). It will start as essay; after we get something reasonable we can hold an RfC to have it promoted to a guideline. This will be hard work but we need to establish some principles that can gain wide enough consensus (which will definitely not be unanimous) to hold.
This is much more general than the backward looking stuff about the WMF's overstepping with the description field and should help alleviate surprises and clashes in the future.....
If anybody is aware of an essay that has already been started on this, please point to it.... Jytdog ( talk) 19:42, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Given the increasingly heated recent discussions about Wikidata infoboxes, I think that we need to have an RfC on this topic sooner rather than later. So, taking the plunge, I've started a page at
Wikipedia:Wikidata/2017 RfC draft to draft an RfC specifically on Wikidata usage in infoboxes. It will not cover Wikidata descriptions, or other uses of Wikidata info outside of infoboxes (those would need a separate RfC). I've styled it on
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2, as I think that format (particularly with background info and suggested options) yielded a clear consensus. I suggest that we collaboratively work on this draft for a while before we start the RfC (at least a fortnight, maybe a month or so). To keep the discussion together, I've redirected the talk page here. So, please be bold, but also be neutral, and help draft this. Thanks.
Mike Peel (
talk)
00:36, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
|area=12.3 ha
. In that case, the value entered is what would be used. For some infoboxes, however, if the area
value is empty or missing, the value from Wikidata would be used, if available. The key point is that data entered at enwiki would override Wikidata. Another consideration is that an infobox should limit what it displays. For example, there have been many heated discussions about whether a religion should be displayed in a person's infobox—I believe the current consensus is that such labels should not be displayed but instead should be discussed in the article when appropriate because that would allow clarification of the meaning and significance of the religion for that person. The current wording of option 2 would allow editors to add anything which exists in Wikidata, including religion.
Johnuniq (
talk)
01:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
At present, an editor creating a Wikidata-aware infobox has the following options available to them as documented in Module:WikidataIB:
Other options are available using other Lua modules, for example Module:Wd enables the retrieval of the raw references from Wikidata. Work is in progress (e.g. {{ Cite Q}}) to consolidate the format of references with the CS1/2 styles of citation templates.
I think that commentators ought to be aware of what is possible now, and cognisant of the improvements made to meet users' wishes since the last RfC in 2013. I see no value in re-hashing old chestnuts like "... permit Wikidata inclusion only when there is no existing English Wikipedia data for a specific field in the infobox" because that's nonsensical in absolute terms. The infobox designer doesn't know what fields have existing data in them in different articles. The proper formulation is "... permit Wikidata inclusion in each field of an article's infobox unless that field has locally supplied data", and that's not even debatable. Everybody agrees with that, so why waste electrons on discussing it further? Pretty much the same goes for unreferenced information. Unless it's "sky is blue" obvious, (or self-referential like ICD), nobody is going to be asking infobox designers to display unsourced information in infoboxes. Why do we need to discuss that? Take it as a given, and keep the RfC simple and up-to-date: something along the lines of "Should infoboxes be permitted to import data from Wikidata, as long as local values override Wikidata values and all non-obvious values are sourced?" -- RexxS ( talk) 15:35, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
|onlysourced={{{onlysourced|}}}
to each appropriate field in the infobox design. That will give an editor who is keen on this sort of work a chance to preview an infobox with onlysourced=no to see what fields in Wikidata need sourcing, and hopefully go a little way to improve the lamentable state of sourcing in Wikidata. As an aside, when I want a reality check, I sometimes paste {{#invoke:Sandbox/RexxS/WdRefs|seeRefs}}
into an article and preview the result. It's inevitably depressing. But it can only get better. --
RexxS (
talk)
10:47, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
I made a major revision of the table Options for using Wikidata in infoboxes. Here's a permalink to my proposed version of the table for examination, in case anyone reverts or revises it. I believe issues such as sourcing would have to be addressed independently of that list. Alsee ( talk) 17:57, 6 October 2017 (UTC)