This article originally appeared on the CCCB Lab blog of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
This article originally appeared on the CCCB Lab blog of the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
Discuss this story
How old was someone, knowing that he was born in 1821 and died in 1881? Maybe 1881-1821=60 years old. But born 1821-01-01, died 1881-12-31 gives 61 years old, while born 1821-12-31, died 1881-01-01 gives 59 years old. But there are countries where the birth of a child is her first anniversary. But there are lunar years. And what remains is something between 58 and 63 years old. When someone is reported as 1821--1881, this is even worse. And therefore, the question is not about what is written in the database, but about the confidence we can give to the way the data were collected to build the database. E.g. what says Wikidata about the death of Kim Hong-do ? Pldx1 (talk) 08:25, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
“doctors who graduated before they turned 20” – How would this query look like?--Kopiersperre (talk) 15:41, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wikimedia-l discussion, Slate article
There is an ongoing discussion about Wikidata's quality issues and their wider implications on the Wikimedia-l mailing list: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/654001
A key fact here is that at present, only about 20% of Wikidata content is referenced to a reliable source. About half is unreferenced, and about a third is only referenced to a Wikipedia. [1]
For wider context, see yesterday's article in Slate exploring the links between Wikidata and Google's Knowledge Graph: "Why Does Google Say Jerusalem Is the Capital of Israel?" Andreas JN466 15:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Mass updates
Wikidata has some way to go but has the potential to be a massive help to building and maintaining Wikipedia. For me, the biggest advantage is the ability to store information in once place that's referenced in many Wikipedia articles, and updated suddenly. The example was given of election results; I'm still finding many articles that list incorrect members of parliament or local councillors because they haven't been updated and there's no central reference of which articles contain such information. Another prime example is census data; many UK geography articles still list the population as at the 2001 census, not the (more recent) 2011 census or any of the subsequent population estimates from the Office for National Statistics.
Working through articles that find such information to update them is time consuming and mindnumbingly dull. Because we prefer to write information in prose, writing a bot to do it isn't really an option; using templates could work but would be much harder to update than Wikidata's slick user interface is. Out of date governance and demographic information is a big problem in geographical articles and Wikidata solves that problem for us; that alone is reason enough to embrace it and welcome it with open arms. Yes, it has flaws, but let's remember it's in its infancy. When someone views an article and sees a population figure that's 14 years out of date, it doesn't make us look good. So I say let's put the effort in to make WikiData work for us. WaggersTALK 11:26, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]