A Red&Blue Wikibase for the red, blue and black wikilinks of each @Wikipedia

Wikipedia uses blue links to maneuver between its articles. When there is no article it is called a "red link". This text based functionality works reasonably well but it has important limitations.

• article names are constructs that makes them unique
• disambiguation pages need to be maintained
• there are false positives linking to the wrong articles

When you know your Wikipedia history well, one of the most effective innovations was to remove the interwiki links from the Wikipedias and replace them with links to Wikidata. Wikidata makes use of identifiers and as a consequence the change of an article name has no effect, this ensures that articles on the same subject remain properly linked.

The Wikidata project uses the Wikibase software and this enables the "federation" of multiple databases. This means that data may exist in multiple databases but it all work together. 

Suppose that you replace both the blue links and the red links in a Wikipedia with identifiers of a separate Wikibase. Almost all blue links will implicitly be linked to a Wikidata item and Wikidata already knows about the relations between blue links it has items for. Consequently a Wikipedia Red&Blue Wikibase will be richly populated from the start.

Every Wikipedia remains autonomous and we keep it that way. But we DO know more at Wikidata because it is a superset of all Wikipedias. So when a Wikipedia knows about an award, so does Wikidata. When Wikidata knows about more recipients, it is suggested to include them as red links. It must be a suggestion because a Wikipedia may have another script, another naming convention for names and this has to be correct before it becomes available as text in the Wikipedia proper. 

When a label is correct for a Wikipedia, it is obvious that there is to be a link to the item AND that the label can be used for that language as well. With 200+ Wikipedias enriching Wikidata in this way, both the multilingual and the multicultural quality & quantity of Wikidata will sky rocket.

• Wikipedias remain autonomous in their content
• Wikidata will progress from a technically multi lingual project to a functional multi lingual project
• Disambiguation will be technically available for all accepted Red&Blue labels
• Known relations with a reference will be available with a reference to every Wikipedia.

So what is not to like?

Thanks,  GerardM

#Wikidata vs #Wikipedia - Rukmini Maria Callimachi

Mrs Callimachi did not only win the Polk Award, she is both a journalist and a poet and did not only win journalism awards. One of the awards, the Michael Kelly Award is hidden on the Wikipedia article of Michael Kelly. 

This article is about how Wikidata and English Wikipedia can help each other. The Wikipedia article lists seven awards and this makes it easy to add other award winners for them as well.

Thanks to Magnus' awarder, this is fairly easy but some awards hide out as part of an article and the award has to be added in Wikidata.  It may be one reason why later awards are missing. The religious award she is said to have won, it is a different award with a similar name. The award and the organisation that confers it had to be created.

The point, we can compare data at a Wikipedia with what we have on Wikidata. They should match. When they do not, there is an issue. Copying the data from Wikipedia is easy and it is the obvious thing to do. When Wikipedians decry the quality of Wikidata, they should reflect on why this is the case. When we collaborate, we will slowly but surely improve our quality. In the final analysis our aim is the same; share in the sum of all knowledge.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia vs #Wikidata - the George Polk Awards

Some Wikipedians consider Wikidata inferior, so much so that they agitate towards a policy that bans Wikidata in "their" Wikipedia. They are welcome to their opinion.

I do bulk imports from Wikipedia and all the time I suffer the consequences. Some three to four percent of their data is wrong for all kinds of reasons, reasons that are manageable with proper tooling.

The George Polk Award is an award for journalism and it got my attention again because the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists received it for their work on the Panama Papers. I noticed that many people listed who had been awarded the Polk Award did not have articles in Wikipedia, that many of the link in the list of award winners pointed to the wrong person and that many award winners did not even have a "red link".

I am in the process of checking all the links and adding the date for the award. I found many issues among them a civil war general and many others false friends. I am adding items for the people who do not have an English article and, I have to check each of them because several do have articles in other languages. It is a lot of work and it is not as useful as it could be because Wikipedia hates Wikidata and we do not collaborate, we do not work together.

There is a Listeria list of winners and slowly but surely it will contains the information that is similar to the English Wikipedia list article. Similar but not the same;

• the false friends will not be there, 
• there will be no red or black links
• people who won the award twice will be missing

Why do this, why spend so much time on one big list? Well, in this day and age of "fake news" we should celebrate journalism but having all this information in Wikidata allows for all kinds of tools as well. We can check for false friends, we can check if the articles on the award winners include the award but also if there are "winners" who are not known in this list and in the source available for the George Polk winners..

I am not a Wikipedian and truthfully I hate the endless and senseless bickering that is going on. So let me work on the data, make it available to tools. Now you Wikipedians, you may choose not to show Wikidata data in your infoboxes but you will not make your errors go away without collaboration. Yes, you can quote a source but when your data is not in line with what the source states, having a source does not do you good, effectively you provide fake information.

My request to the reasonable people at Wikipedia and Wikidata, let us work together and see how we can improve quality. Lets link wiki links (blue, red and black) to Wikidata and improve the quality of what is on offer first.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikipedia; Héctor Rondón did not win the #Polk Award

This is Héctor Rondón, he pitches for the Cubs. He did not win the George Polk award, Héctor Rondón Lovera did.

This is a common mistake, it happens all the time and it is where Wikidata may make a positive difference to Wikipedia.. It just requires a different mindset to see why this is the right solution at this time. There are some loud Wikipedians that abhor Wikidata. This is an easy and obvious method that will improve Wikipedia and there is no sane argument why this would not work.

These Wikipedians do not even have to notice that this is done; we can hide it from them and still do a world of good. Not just for English Wikipedia but for all Wikipedias.. Ehm, for the readers of all Wikipedias.
Thanks,
      GerardM