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I just looked at one example being Richard Dattner who founded Dattner Architects, an architecture firm based in New York City. The Wikidata item for Richard D
by dhx 5y ago
I just looked at one example being Richard Dattner who founded Dattner Architects, an architecture firm based in New York City.
The Wikidata item for Richard Dattner[1] was created in 2020 by a bot importing data from authority files such as VIAF. Other than being a human with a name, Wikidata didn't know anything else about Richard so I added a few properties from some public sites where the information can be found. I also created a new Wikidata item for the firm Dattner Architects[2] which Richard founded and linked it to other Wikidata items which Wikipedia indicates were architected by this firm.
I can see how no one has yet created a Wikipedia page for Richard Dattner or his firm because:
1. There isn't much public information on the Internet about Richard Dattner or Dattner Architects outside a few specialised architecture websites.
2. Not many English Wikipedia pages mention Dattner Architects as being an architect and when they do, it's because Dattner Architects were asked to redesign or upgrade a small part of a building or larger site, and English Wikipedia likes to combine small topics into large topics hence it's very unlikely that a head house (station house) of a larger train station would receive it's own article. Wikidata has no problem with having individual items for specific parts of a park, site or train station but no on has created the subordinate items yet.
3. The firm appears to be mainly involved with New York City based projects and therefore outside of Wikipedia editors interested in New York City architecture, would be less likely to have European editors (for example) interested in creating a new article.
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q94687303 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q94687303
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q111631560 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q111631560
- mjd 5y agoDattner was most active in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a good deal of printed material about him and the adventure playgrounds that dates from that time. But it is not available online; to find it, I needed to walk into actual libraries. Sometimes good research takes actual effort.
- jacobolus 5y agoYou should at the least make a stub article for Dattner with a few sentences about who he was, and a few citations to the most important printed material you found about him. If you have time, you could write a more complete biography of a few paragraphs, again with citations to relevant literature. (And likewise for your other suggestions.) There are many, many interesting people missing from Wikipedia. The only way they ever get added is if those who miss their absence do something about it. Making a list of “stuff missing from Wikipedia” and hosting it at your own site is much less useful.
- dhx 5y agoI do agree that books are the primary source of information for most subjects pre-2000, but at some point the books become so obscure that outside of a special reading room request made to the central library of a large country, no one would be able to verify the one or two book references on a Wikipedia article that would adequately describe the subject.
- ghaff 5y agoWell, that is one of the--for lack of a better term--fictions that Wikipedia (at least in theory) leans on. Which is to say an admin may or may not decide to follow the fiction. But, in theory, so long as something is cited whether or not as a practical matter a person would realistically look up the cite that should be sufficient. Of course, even verifying the cite could also be hard in practice.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoWhat's with these wikidata bots? I added some botulinum toxin data once years ago and now I'm getting spammed with thousands of edit notifications.