Tuesday, January 05, 2016

#Wikidata - Wolfgang Stroebe, not a Dutch psychologist

Mr Stroebe is an emeritus professor, a psychologist who worked for German, American and Dutch universities. From 1992 he worked at the university of Utrecht but that does not make him Dutch.

People could be mistaken for him being Dutch because the description on Wikidata says so: "Dutch social psychologist". Disambiguating Mr Stroebe with Reasonator shows clearly the qualitative difference between automated and manual descriptions.

The difference between the two is an old argument. People may like them but factually manual descriptions are inferior. It takes little effort to improve automated descriptions on a big scale while nobody really looks at descriptions of individual people like Mr Stroebe. Manual descriptions are translated and who dares to suggest that with translations the quality of the descriptions improves? The opposite is easy to argue. With translations, issues become even harder to remedy.

Never mind.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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