Ghuron
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People are ill-prepared for bulk editing of structured data; a computer program can do this much better. But the machine (until strong AGI is achieved) is very limited in sources of structured data. This inevitably leads to the fact that machine editing of Wikidata introduces a small percentage of errors that are clearly visible to the human eye. But Wikipedia success has taught us that it is human who is able to concentrate on a small subset of contemporary human knowledge and express it in a perfectly harmonious form.
To keep Wikidata up to date, one need to periodically import information from external sources. Imported information must be understandable to regular Wikidata editors and fit well with the changes it makes.
Identifiers edit
An external identifier serves two purposes. On the one hand, it is important that the Wikidata editor can click on it and see the source of the imported data on the page that opens. On the other hand, the import program needs it to correlate records in the external system with Wikidata elements.
By itself, an incorrect external identifier associated with a Wikidata item is a minor problem. However, if an automatic import is performed based on the incorrect identifier, the item will be "poisoned" with a large number of statements that make no sense. Most often such problems have to be fixed manually and this requires significant effort.
Some external data sources tend to change/remove identifiers and the sooner we know about this, the less manual work will be required to correct it later. The import program can detect such changes (and, if possible, automatically handle simple cases), and the human maintainer should periodically review execution logs and property constraint violation reports to determine the need for manual intervention. If possible, one should keep the number of “duplicates” (situations where several elements have the same external identifier) to zero.
References edit
Each Wikidata statement created/updated/deleted by the machine:
- must have one and only one Property:P248 snak that is intended to be used for verification of the statement. The only exceptions are external identifiers
- may contain zero or more Property:P12132 snaks identifying the source data aggregator used to import the statement (see WD:Property proposal/according to for more details)
- if the statement contains a reference to a wikidata item, it also may contain a Property:P5997 snak with the name, by which that item is mentioned in the source
- Property:P813 has a valid use, but if the import process is executed every week, updating those snaks will result in a huge number of meaningless edits that will appear on editors' watchlists and waste their review time. Therefore I do not use it
- some editors prefer to specify the external identifier not only as a statement at the entire element level, but also as the source for each specific statement. This approach is convenient for several reasons, but it significantly complicates the process of changing the identifier (see above), therefore I do not do it. However, if the element being updated does not contain the correct external identifier (for example, the imported information about the host star is contained on the exoplanet page), the external identifier must be specified in the same reference in which the corresponding Property:P248 snak is stored.
Other properties are usually ignored during automatic import and should be left as is.