

Wikipedia is now drawing facts from the Wikidata repository - eksith
http://gigaom.com/2013/04/26/wikipedia-is-now-drawing-facts-from-the-wikidata-repository-and-so-can-you/

======
eksith
Well, this discussion is quickly moving toward the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

There's plenty of opinion of the deletion-happy (if that's the operative term)
policy of the admins, especially as it pertains to notability, and I think
this is a common complaint :
[http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/rants/wikipedia-
delete.ht...](http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/rants/wikipedia-delete.html)

I do something that may seem like trying to fix a leaky dam with chewing gum,
but every time I see an article nominated for deletion, I copy the source to a
private wiki I'm running. Sometimes, the deletion nomination goes away, other
times it does get deleted, but at least then, I have a copy.

But we also have to keep in mind that there are plenty of other resources on
the web specifically aimed at niche resources. E.G. Wikia. I've lost count of
how many comic book related articles were deleted only to show up on the DC or
Marvel wikis. ( <http://dc.wikia.com/> <http://marvel.wikia.com/> )

Likewise, it's not unreasonable that a lot of content gets missed by the
editors, since it's a big place and most editors have one or two areas that
they focus on. As the editing guidelines state, when in doubt engage in
dispute resolution, not edit wars. If you can make a good case for why an
article _should_ be there in the first place, be persuasive in the talk pages.

So a few pointers for people getting angry at Wikipedia:

First, ask whether the article is a good fit for the wiki. Can it go on a blog
or a niche wiki (like a dedicated Wikia) instead? The Pokémon example is a bit
extreme, but I think many of those pages may get deleted or merged. There's
always the Pokémon Wikia : <http://pokemon.wikia.com>

Second, notability is a very tricky thing. Reputable sources may be even
trickier. Rather than debating notability, focus on reputable sources (since
that's the biggest hiccup for references). If you can link NY Times articles
or BBC or some other news source, rather than just community sites, other
blogs (depending on popularity) etc... you'll have a better chance of getting
the article/section through and staying there.

Third, well written articles have a better chance of surviving than those that
give off the 2-3 paragraph stub vibe. The more reputable citations and best
content structure you can give, the better the chances an article survives
(this may partly explain the Pokémon pages too). If you have trivia, try to
merge it into the content body more, rather than list at the end; that feels
tacked on and superfluous, if not directly supporting the main content.

Fourth, try to be a bit more empathetic to the goals of the Wiki while being
objective to the subject when asserting your views (especially on
controversial articles). How you word things is a big hint as to whether that
content will remain or get scrubbed the next day/hour/minute.

Now, I hope can go back to discussing Wikidata and how Wikipedia and everyone
else will benefit.

~~~
lmm
I consider TV Tropes to be the spiritual successor of wikipedia, and what
wikipedia should have been, and would encourage people to contribute there
instead - even for more "encyclopaedic" topics, its "Useful Notes" articles
are often more informative than their wikipedia equivalents. It has an
explicit policy of "no such thing as notability".

------
nsns
OT: I was using Wikipedia the other day and it occurred to me how primitive it
is to have all the inner links to other Wikipedia articles defined manually,
surely these should have been automated by now (i.e., marking a word or two
would link you to the relevant article).

~~~
nostromo
The disambiguation could be challenging. (Does "The Sun" link to our closest
star or the tabloid in the UK.)

It would be a fun project to try and determine the correct link based on the
context.

~~~
mindcrime
Just make the link to the disambiguation page, if there is one? Otherwise,
make it a special link that doesn't go anywhere directly, but uses some
javascript/CSS to raise a dialog when clicked, that gives you the different
choices?

~~~
helium
I don't think it would be a good idea if wikipedia required that you to run
Javascript to navigate the site, and it would make for pretty bad SEO.

~~~
eru
Wikipedia doesn't need to care to much about SEO.

------
cpeterso
I'm surprised no one (AFAICT) has attempted a family tree of all humans. There
is an obvious demand for this information because many commercial services
exist. Users are _paying_ to upload their personal genealogical data to
proprietary for-profit silos. Yet this data would be much more productive in
an open system with user data from all services.

You could seed the database with famous people's family trees from Wikidata.
The Mormon church also has lots of genealogy data that (perhaps :) they might
share for not-for-profit use.

The biggest challenge would be preventing trolls and spammers from uploading
false data. I've sketched out some rough ideas where family links can be
"thumbs up'd" bidirectionally by people on both sides of the connection, but
not necessarily the immediate people.

~~~
samegreatsleeve
The genealogists are always happy to share their data. It's part of the
culture.

There's no open source genealogy programmers because the young nerds that do
open source dont care about genealogy.

~~~
maxerickson
<http://gramps-project.org/>

<http://pauillac.inria.fr/~ddr/GeneWeb/en/>

There are others. I guess there aren't many, but there are some.

------
epaulson
Can someone point to an example wikipedia page that's actually drawing from
wikidata? When I hit wikidata and look up random items (say, item 1000, the
country of Gabon: <http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1000> ) and then look at the
source for the English wikipedia page for Gabon, I don't see anything that
suggests any of the facts are coming from wikidata.

This seems to be more "all wikipedias can now draw facts from wikidata", and
certainly isn't "all facts in wikipedia come from wikidata." The former is
cool, the latter would be mind-blowing - but I'm not sure how far along we are
on the path to "{all|most|some|a few} facts come from wikidata"

~~~
mjn
Poking around a bit, I found this press release:
[https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/04/24/wikidata-all-around-
the...](https://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/04/24/wikidata-all-around-the-world/)

It looks like the ability to pull Wikidata into infoboxes was just rolled out
a week ago, so I guess it wouldn't actually be used yet in a lot of places.

------
Lightning
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5623760>

~~~
jpatokal
More relevant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5328472>

------
rsync
It's too bad that all of these grand visions and _truly_ positive developments
for humanity are locked inside of an exclusionary, elitist organization that
is governed by deletionism and will take any contribution you might possibly
make and CRUSH IT LIKE A BUG.

~~~
tripzilch
> deletionism

you might enjoy Deletionpedia:
[http://www.deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_...](http://www.deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page)

~~~
GFischer
Very interesting :)

I can see why most were deleted, I chose to view a few pages at random and
they were:

\- a really non-notable musician (probably self-promotion)

\- a hoax ("The Independent City-State of Sonora")

\- a game guide to Super Smash Brawl, this is probably something that should
have gone on a blog / GameFAQs

\- a witty bio about a non-notable person (probably self-bio, or a friend's)

I believe the four of them were deservedly well deleted. Two of the cases, the
musician and the game guide, should be hosted elsewhere (personal blog or
website).

~~~
Steko
"deservedly well deleted"

Under a critereon of "notability" that works great for dead trees but is
largely irrelevant to an online primarily text reference.

------
yoran
The semantic web has gotten one step closer!

------
minopret
Good. For quite some time, census data was incorporated as a one-time
substitution into geographical articles by a bot. With this new development, I
suppose that census data can be incorporated as a "transclusion" that is
updated automatically either on schedule or on demand.

~~~
gioele
But you will need a bot to populate and update the WikiData source. :)

------
Mindless2112
I wish they would do something like this with Wiktionary. A dictionary doesn't
need all the flexibility of wiki-syntax, and having the data in a stricter
structure makes it much more useable.

~~~
mjn
There's a bit of discussion loosely collected here:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary_future>

------
themgt
Wikidata is interesting ... it seems to be a normal MediaWiki install with the
custom-developed "WikiBase" extension:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikibase>

It'd be nice if the WikiMedia projects had a proper GitHub presence - it's
hard to get a sense how plausible a self-hosted version of this is.

~~~
yuvipanda
There's gerrit.wikimedia.org, and it is mirrored to github.com/wikimedia. Not
sure how you can get a sense of how plausible a self hosted veresion of this
is from that though :) The mediawiki.org page you linked is the best resource
for that.

------
downandout
They could have made this and many other advances years ago, had they adopted
contextual advertising. I don't think anyone would argue that the advertiser-
financed services provided by Google are a bad thing.

~~~
Hello71
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements#Argum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advertisements#Arguments_against_adverts)

Insignificant revenue. The click-through rate might very well be so low that
only a small amount of revenue would be brought in by the ads. It would not be
worth barraging thousands of readers with ads for only a few pennies of
revenue.

Ads cheapen the encyclopedia. By their very nature, ads are biased content
intended to influence people. They are thus diametrically opposed to the goals
of a neutral encyclopedia intended to inform people. They would cheapen the
encyclopedia in the eyes of many readers, as evidenced by the numerous anti-ad
comments received during every donation drive.

Contributors may leave. Many contributors vigorously oppose ads (see the
forking of the Spanish Wikipedia, 1, 2, 3, 4), and in 2009 the Wikimedia
Foundation promised to keep "Wikipedia. Ad-free forever." Since about 2002,
Jimbo Wales has repeatedly stated that he opposes all advertising on Wikipedia
as well. Based on these statements, some editors have probably contributed
with the understanding that their content would not be diluted with ads.
Changing the long-standing no-ads policy now could reasonably be perceived as
a bait and switch tactic. Numerous contributors are likely to leave as a
result and new ones are less likely to start. Contributor goodwill is
Wikipedia's main asset and should not be gambled with.

Annoying and distracting. Readers come to us for encyclopedic information, not
for ads. Ads have to be processed by the brain (if only subconsciously) and
therefore distract and annoy. "The free encyclopedia" also means: free from
distractions and annoyances.

Privacy violation. If an ad consolidator such as Google AdSense is used, the
privacy of our readers is compromised. The consolidator will invariably learn
which Wikipedia articles a given IP address reads or searches for; they can
then correlate that information with other data they may have about that IP
address (e.g. Gmail account).

et cetera et cetera et cetera.

~~~
downandout
Wrong.

~~~
theon144
Your arguments are very persuasive, although they could use a bit elaboration.

~~~
downandout
He copied and pasted from a Wikipedia page, so I spent as much time crafting
my response as he did. More importantly, those arguments are so blatantly
wrong on their surface that I don't believe they justify more than a one word
response.

