#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 - Ischia International Journalism Award & the Polk Award

When people win awards, they often win multiple awards. Harrison Salisbury won several awards not only the Polk Award. The Ischia award did not have a date associated with it. I used Awarder and the data from the Italian Wikipedia because that was most convenient.

There was no article for Mr Salisbury in Italian and consequently there was no date associated with him. Mr Salisbury is represented with a red link. It indicated 1990 and it was an easy manual edit.

As you can imagine, that red link could link to the information about Mr Salisbury on Wikidata. Showing this information to those who are interested in writing a Wikipedia article in Italian does provide pertinent information, information that should coincide with the new article. By comparing the information in Wikidata and in existing Wikipedia articles you know that the article is likely to be correct.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Trust

I read an article, I found what was written astounding and signalled that I had to read it again to really understand what is said and what it implies. The article was published in a quality newspaper; the Independent. The reply that I got was: "Indeed. And it's Fisk, so you can't just pretend it is an obscure journalist talking about something that may have happened..."

As I did not know Robert Fisk, I looked him up. I checked his Wikipedia article and found that he has indeed a reputation that is really good. He received many more rewards than was known at Wikidata so I added several and it is fun to establish the quality of its sources. For the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize the Lannan website says it all. It is linked on the item for the award and that should suffice. For the Amnesty International UK Media Award it is not so obvious. It is conferred by te UK branch of Amnesty International and it has no dedicated page for the award. I added the award, the chapter and had a look at the pages for the award ceremony for each year. These Wikipedia articles refer to webpages that no longer exist.

For the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize I added the other recipients because it gives some insight in the relevance of the award. I did not do this for the Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.

The point of this all is that reputation amounts to trust about the message that is written. Read the article, it is likely that you are not familiar with the Wahhabi belief, a subset of Sunni Islam that is practiced in Saudi Arabia. The article is about 200 Sunni scholars that denounce the Wahhabi belief. Several major scholars are involved. Have a read and have a think, the article is by a major journalist published in a major news paper about something that is not without consequences.
Thanks,
       GerardM