4 ms·

I'm a big believer in Wikidata as an independent and free source of facts, but there are two major flaws in this: 1. It's super tricky to get the queries right

by drej 6y ago

I'm a big believer in Wikidata as an independent and free source of facts, but there are two major flaws in this: 1. It's super tricky to get the queries right. SPARQL is so unknown by the data community, so it's hard to get help. Plus there are super sudden quirks that lead to erroneous results (e.g. not all relationships are shown if you filter the data _some way_ but no in a _slightly different way_). 2. Wikidata facts are often _not_ leveraged by Wikipedia itself. This leads to divergence between the two datasets, sadly the more popular one is also the one that's unstructured. Unless we properly tie these two services, we won't get an up-to-date linked database. I have worked fairly hard on updating Wikidata with local facts (politics, mostly) over the past year or so and the two issues noted above have consistently dampened by motivation to continue.

oxguy3 6y ago
Speaking of politics, that's often why Wikidata is not linked to Wikipedia. Most of the smaller language Wikipedias are eager to use Wikidata, as it provides data on a scale they couldn't achieve on their own. But the biggest Wikipedia, the English one, is very resistant to implementing Wikidata support, as they feel their local info is better maintained than Wikidata info. Which is true, but ignores the likelihood that Wikidata would improve very quickly if enwiki started using it. A very short-sighted and selfish attitude.
- drej 6y ago
  This is a case of a smaller Wikipedia (a country of 10M people, 400k articles or so). I've talked with our local Wikimedia orgs and there are basically two arguments: 1. It would be fairly difficult to implement an infobox that would load all the data properly (e.g. party membership, by-elections, complex elections etc.) 2. Some people would be sad to see their thousands of manual edits being replaced by an automated source of information.

by drej 6y ago

oxguy3 6y ago

Speaking of politics, that's often why Wikidata is not linked to Wikipedia. Most of the smaller language Wikipedias are eager to use Wikidata, as it provides data on a scale they couldn't achieve on their own. But the biggest Wikipedia, the English one, is very resistant to implementing Wikidata support, as they feel their local info is better maintained than Wikidata info. Which is true, but ignores the likelihood that Wikidata would improve very quickly if enwiki started using it. A very short-sighted and selfish attitude.

drej 6y ago
This is a case of a smaller Wikipedia (a country of 10M people, 400k articles or so). I've talked with our local Wikimedia orgs and there are basically two arguments: 1. It would be fairly difficult to implement an infobox that would load all the data properly (e.g. party membership, by-elections, complex elections etc.) 2. Some people would be sad to see their thousands of manual edits being replaced by an automated source of information.