Thursday, January 15, 2015

#Wikidata - my #bias and two articles about #diversity

As a volunteer, I spend a great amount of time making Wikidata more informative. With currently 1,896,739 edits, it is obvious that I use tools.

What I am looking for in tools is that I can use them. They do not have to be scientific, they just have to be functional. It means that I can use it at home or wherever I happen to be on any computer.

At this time there are two tools for querying Wikidata. One provides us with near real time data and the other has huge prerequisites. It is however the preferred option by people with a scientific bend.

Both approaches have been used to write about diversity. Their outcome is similar. However, I am biased towards the tool that is available to me. If I wanted to, I could run the same queries and will have have similar results. Results that will be different because of the time that has passed.

The other tool requires huge investments of me and it will only provide me with static data. Maybe the results are the same and very scientific but it will not help me improve Wikidata, it is therefore of no use to me. It reflects on data from the past. It does not compare data from the present with data I have elsewhere.

On this blog I did mention gender ratios like the two publications do. My issue with all that information is that it misses on one thing; how Wikidata is becoming more informative about diversity. As it is becoming more informative, it becomes also more useful as a tool to look at diversity in Wikipedia in the past.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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