Sunday, February 17, 2019

@WikiResearch - Nihil de nobis, sine nobis

There is this wonderful notion how Research is going to tell us what to do in light of the strategic Wikimedia 2030 plans. Wonderful. There is going to be this taxonomy of the information we are missing.

Let me be clear. We do need research and the data it is based on, it is to be available to us. There is no point in a future taxonomy of missing knowledge when we have been asking for decades : "what articles are people looking for that they cannot find". If there is to be a taxonomy what else should it be based on?

When we are to fill in the gaps of what Wikipedia covers, we can stimulate more new articles by indicating what traffic they get in the first month. Stimulate our readers to learn more by showing what Wikidata has to offer and show its links to texts in other languages. It may even result in new stubs even articles in "their" language. This technology has been available for years now.

The WikiResearch is full of arguments on the importance of citations and Wikidata as the platform for all Wikipedia sources, why then are the WikiResearch papers not in Wikidata from the start. What is it, that WikiResearchers consider that Wikidata is not about them? Just as it is about any other subject Wikidata covers? What is it that makes their work less findable (FAIR) than what is known to have been published as open content by the NIH?

The point I want to make is that no matter how well intended it is what the WikiResearch aims to achieve, they lose the interest, involvement and commitment of people like me, the people they need to get the results they aim for.

Yes do research, but we should not wait for its results, we know how to stimulate people to write new articles.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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