#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

#Wikidata - Tokyo University of the Arts alumni

Mr Kenji Ekuan died. He was a Japanese designer who studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts. As can be expected, he was not the only one who studied there. There are categories in several Wikipedias informing us about them. The category on the Japanese Wikipedia has includes 642 alumni and for many of them there is no label in other languages.

It is no surprise either that these people refer to many items that have a label in Japanese and not in the languages people are familiar with. The automated description for Mr Munemoto Yanagi in Dutch for instance is "kunsthistoricus (*1917); Mainichi-Kulturpreis; kind van 柳宗悦 en 柳兼子 ♂". As more labels become available in Dutch, this information becomes easier to comprehend.

With every label that is added, all the associated descriptions are improved. Every item will be easier understood in Reasonator as well. Adding labels in Reasonator will provide you with instant gratification. Every statement of that item will show the new label.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - automated #descriptions are GIGO

The great thing about automated descriptions of Wikidata items is that they reflect what is there. The consequence is that when it is not good, it will show.

I discussed automated descriptions with my friend Amir and he pointed me to that "East Jerusalem" is not a "world heritage site". He is absolutely right; world heritage site is a qualification of whatever it is that has been recognised in this way.

Amir also pointed out that whenever labels are missing, automated description will give you something in another language. This is not a bug, it is a feature. All it takes is for someone to add the missing label and wherever it is used, the label will show in the "current" language in future. One alternative is NOT showing statements when they have no labels. Another alternative is to make it configurable if you want as much as possible or information only in the current language.

The point about automated descriptions stands; adding one statement may impact descriptions in all languages. Adding one label will impact all items that include the associated statement for that language.

Obviously an automated description is superior to no description. Arguably automated descriptions are superior to manual description because they reflect the item in any and all language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - a #disambiguation best practice: Mr Bob Boyd

Mr Bob Boyd died. At some time they all do. As you can see several of them already did. What you see is in Finnish. This example of disambiguation could have been in any language.

That is very much the point. With Reasonator we disambiguate in any language.

We can when we ignore the effort that goes in adding descriptions. Many of these descriptions are out of date, incomplete or just not available. I do not fix descriptions; I prefer to fix automated descriptions. I do this by adding missing statements. In this way the automated description is fixed in any language.

When people add descriptions with a bot, they could have added statements in stead. It would have been useful and when all the effort had gone into adding statements, Wikidata would be in much better shape.

As it is, there is no convincing argument for having fixed descriptions. They suck. They are mono-lingual where Wikidata is not.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - let us get rid of fixed descriptions

In Wikidata, there are "descriptions" for each item. They may have been a good idea at the time.. everybody does them. But really what helps most:

• Achilleas Gerokostopoulos (Q4673724) : Greek politician 
• Achilleas Gerokostopoulos (Q4673724) : Greek politician and lawyer, member of parliament and minister (1850–1900) ♂

When there are two Mr Gerokostopoulos to choose from, which one to choose .. or you do not know English and prefer another language.. Even more adventurous, new information is added and, the generated text gets updated automagically while the fixed texts weighs us down even more.

Really.. Why have them? What is the added value? What stops Wikidata to get rid of all that junk? The best argument is that it frees up time to add more statements!

Thanks,

      GerardM