Op-ed
Whither Wikidata?
Just over half of all statements in Wikidata are unreferenced, according to the latest published figures. Source: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/stats.php
Wikidata, a Wikimedia project spearheaded by Wikimedia Deutschland, recently celebrated its third anniversary. The project has a dual purpose: 1. Streamline data housekeeping within Wikipedia. 2. Serve as a data source for re-users on the web; in particular, Wikidata is the designated successor to Google's Freebase, designed to deliver data for the Google Knowledge Graph.
We need to talk about Wikidata.
Wikidata, covered in last week's Signpost issue in a celebratory op-ed that highlighted the project's potential (see Wikidata: the new Rosetta Stone), has some remarkable properties for a Wikimedia wiki:
- A little more than half its statements are unreferenced.
- Of those statements that do have a reference, significantly more than half are referenced only to a language version of Wikipedia (projects like the English, Latvian or Burmese Wikipedia).
- Wikidata statements referenced to Wikipedia do not cite a specific article version, but only name the Wikipedia in question.
- Wikidata has a no-attribution CC0 licence; this means that third parties can use the data on their sites without indicating their provenance, obscuring the fact that the data came from a crowdsourced project subject to the customary disclaimers.
- Hoaxes long extinguished on Wikipedia live on, zombie-like, in Wikidata.
This op-ed examines the situation and its implications, and suggests corrective action.
But first ...