Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The tragedy in a #DBpedia announcement

There was an announcement of achieved goals in the Google Summer of Code for a DBpedia project.
Wikidata integration inside DBpedia we are happy to announce that an initial RDF DBpedia Dumps for Wikidata Data is now available.
Enough reason to read again what this integration is about. The sad thing is in the Additional goals section; "Data quality assurance and tests to improve data quality for academia and enterprises (not for wikipedia infoboxes) would be nice".

The improved data quality is not intended to improve the quality of the data in the Wikipedia infoboxes. This is really sad because as the cooperation with the Deutsche National Bibliothek and the German Wikipedia proves, improvement is beneficial to both parties.

My understanding of why the Wikipedia infoboxes are out of scope is that there has to be a willingness to accept outside 'interference" and we have not learned to cooperate, not even among Wikipedia communities. Wikidata however is the new community and, it has a much higher standard to comply with. The data has to be superior to the data in any Wikipedia because it aims for its data to be used on any Wikipedia.

The best thing to do is side step this issue and make sure that all the questionable data in Wikidata is flagged so that we can start to find out what is best after all.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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