User:John Cummings/Wikidata in Wikimedia projects

A list of common missunderstandings/criticisms/concerns about Wikidata from editors of other Wikimedia projects and replies providing information on how to avoid, improve or correct the issues, or explaining why this isn't true or is an opportunity.

This list will be turned into an information page on using Wikidata data on other Wikimedia projects that will be helpful for providing an overview of the opportunities, challenges and processes for Wikimedia contributors who may not be Wikidata contributors.

Places where these disagreements are happening edit

Wikidata's data quality is not good enough edit

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You can help improve it

Add more info
Check existing info

centralised citations allow us to work together across all language Wikimedia projects, whilst this does mean that if a bad change is made that it will potentially affect more than one place, it also means that there are more people checking the changes made.

Bots, allows us to bring together the technical expertise across all languages

references to Wikipedia are the worst edit

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Yes, they are. Please replace them with better refs.
The same fact may exist in many multiple places in different language Wikipedias e.g a date of birth in an infobox. Using Wikidata this repeat work is vastly reduced.
No they aren't. Those markings will tell us which data comes from Wikipedia so we can mark it or filter it out in results if needed. Source of import markings should not be thinked as references in same context that Wikipedia uses references but as literally source of import.
Maybe, but they aren't consistently used, and there aren't any links to a given version so they don't help if the info was subsequently removed from the Wikipedia (e.g., if the Wikipedia is now using the info from Wikidata!)

lots of statements are not referenced at all edit

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Please help add references

Planned, structured imports from external databases add 1000s or even 10,000 of referenced facts at a time

Not all statements require references: external identifiers with formatter URLs can be verified immediately by following the link. Other wikidata statements may be obvious ("name" instance of "human" is the sort of thing not generally questioned for any person notable enough to be listed).

You can set up the infoboxes to only show referenced statements

the references are not very good edit

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What if they aren't considered reliable references on a project?
What if they are just the URLs, and not complete references?

too much is happening on Wikidata so obviously no-one can keep up with this and keep it free of vandalism edit

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What are the statistics for reversing vandalism on Wikidata?
What tools are available?
cross-language info checking ftw
What Wikidata is doing about vandalism
Not just vandalism, but good faith mistakes, ensuring data quality etc

I can't see changes made to Wikidata entries edit

Please go to Special:Preferences, go to the 'Watchlist' tab, and tick the check-box next to 'Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist'

- Mike Peel, can you expand on these instructions please, this is very important info, do they do this on en.wiki? Is it just for pages that have Wikidata fed infoboxes? Can you give an example? Thanks very much. John Cummings (talk) 14:24, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
  - This is on enwp, but it should work on other wikis as well. It shows changes to Wikidata to articles that you are watching, regardless of whether they contain an infobox or not (OR: they show changes to info that's visible on the page, I've never been quite clear about this). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:55, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

(B) I don't want to see changes made to Wikidata entries edit

-- there are too many of them, and they flood my watchlist.

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A new patch being piloted on el-wiki may help, which will not show Wikidata changes unless they are to statements called on by pages in the page's template tree.

A potential internal technical issue is this requires much bigger database tables to be held and maintained, to relate xx-WP pages to individual statements on WD, rather than just items. (Tables that will only grow even bigger, if/when use of Wikidata data in Wikipedias becomes more established). But early results look promising.

However one Wikidata change might still affect a service template being used on very many pages, which might still lead to Watchlist flooding. So getting to the very best solution on this may require further work.

I can't influence it. Wikidata is a different alien project edit

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Simple ways to get started, simple instructions for simple tasks
Many users would think the same and now they contribute en masse

Wikidata isn't useful for me. I already do everything just fine with the things I have on my wiki edit

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Do you really? Do you like manually updating numbers of inhabitants of all towns and villages in your country every year? Allow people across many language projects to collaborate to keep data up to date, including updating data directly from official sources, e.g inhabitants of a country from national statistics authority

Images, audio and video files have been hosted on Wikimedia Commons since 2004 and transcluded on other Wikimedia projects

I don't want to have to deal with people from all these other projects and come to an agreement. No desire to get into edit wars for no gain edit

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Why should I invest time into this other project? I already have enough to do here edit

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Because Wikidata is multilingual if you contribute information to Wikidata for it to be used on your project all other projects can use it. Building you own sandbox for yourself is selfish.

Very helpful for information only available in one or a small number of languages

Using data from Wikidata makes it a lot harder for people to contribute. It's all so complicated edit

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Adding statements to Wikidata doesn't require an coding or mark up knowledge Simple step by step guides If you want to add a larger amount of information from an external database please make a request on the Wikidata Import Hub