Wikidata:First Birthday/Interview

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Legoktm is an administrator and bureaucrat on Wikidata and an admin on English Wikipedia, where he has been editing since April 2007. He is also the operator of Legobot, which has over 9.5 million global edits, including 6.6 million edits on Wikidata. Izno, who joined English Wikipedia in January 2007, is an administrator on Wikidata. 분당선M, who also goes by DangSunM, is an administrator and translation administrator on Wikidata and has been an editor at Korean Wikipedia since October 2011. John F. Lewis is also an administrator and translation administrator on Wikidata, and has been editing Wikimedia projects since July 2012.

This interview was conducted over IRC by Sven Manguard, with all of the participants in the same channel at the same time. An open call to be interviewed was made on the #wikimedia-wikidata and #wikidata-admin channels and was open to any user that was interested in being interviewed and was IRC at the time. The views expressed here are those of the interviewees only.


How did you first come to Wikidata? What drew you in?
Izno
I first started editing Wikidata on February 14, 2013, making a change to the item on multiplayer online battle arena. As an editor of Wikipedia, I've always been more drawn to the gnomish type stuff -- fixing categories and tweaking here and there. Wikidata is like a gnome's dream come true. I'm also big into all of the technology behind why Wikidata exists -- whether centralized interwiki links or the Semantic Web or even the notion that I would in the future be able to query data about the Wikimedia projects' pages".
John F. Lewis
I first came to Wikidata based on the recommendation of two users. What actually drew me in and making me stick around beyond the first day was the fact how integrated the editing is between users and bot and how easy contributing is. The fact Wikidata is aiming to be the central knowledge of all Wikimedia projects is a secondary reason I stayed and got stuck into Wikidata. I first started editing March 31st 2013 which was mainly small label edits and generating a list of categories and properties to be added into Wikidata by Legobot.
Izno
Yeah, I found it really easy to just dive in. The UI still isn't that exceptional, but adding labels and descriptions is really easy! Really powerful draw for a new Wikidata editor.
Legoktm
Someone needed a bot, so I went ahead and wrote it after playing with the API. The first *real* edit I made was this (cats!). I think that a central data repository is needed. It makes maintaining infoboxes sooo much easier.
DangSunM
At first I just wanted to create items for Seoul subway-related pages, so I started contributing to Wikidata. My first two items were Bundang Line and Giheung Station.
What kinds of things do you do on Wikidata now? And over the past year?
DangSunM
RFD, RFD and RFD! and sometimes I create items from kowiki.
Legoktm
I write bots, help maintain the pywikibot framework, and just do general stuff that needs to get done. I also try and help out in getting new people involved and stuff.
Izno
I participate in policy and guideline discussions. For example, I guess you could say I was one of the more vocal supporters of deprecating GND main type. I also work actively as an administrator, generally in merging and deleting duplicate items. I've also blocked a few bots that were editing outside consensus. I've done a good chunk of work to link pages which weren't or had never been linked before, which is a really cool part of the project.
John F. Lewis
: On Wikidata all of my work has always revolved around deletion to be honest. Before I was an administrator I made regular, practically daily, requests and now as an administrator, I am still active within deletion. In the past few months I have gotten more active with property work which significantly increased my content work. RfC wise, I have closed a few which have led to a change in notability as well as the deprecation of GND main type. As an administrator, while not actively doing anything other than deletions, I do usually deal with protections, blocks and right management. In the past, I used to be an active content contributor with a fair amount of content edits.
What do you think Wikidata's greatest achievements have been thus far?
John F. Lewis
Wikidata's greatest achievement is probably the multilingual support which effectively allows everyone to contribute to a knowledge base and any Wikimedia project without actually needing to know the language. A user can simply add an image to a Wikidata item using properties and that would be a contribution to every project which has a respective article. This is also what Wikidata is doing the best, along with editor engagement.
Legoktm
Migrating all of the interwiki links without any major issues (while there were some, compared to Visual Editor it went rather smoothly). Proper multilingual support with labels, descriptions and aliases. I can't find the page, but there's a page somewhere that you can see the entire solar system and pictures/descriptions through Wikidata in nearly every language. (Late edit: The page is Wikidata:Multilingual Picture dictionary)
Izno
Definitely the million and change in items which have been deleted. That translates to a lot of pages which would have gone unconnected otherwise!
What is Wikidata 'doing right' or 'doing well' already?
Legoktm
Being an environment where bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake is not tolerated, and setting up a proper atmosphere for phase 2 to succeed (lots of bots!)
Izno
I think one of the things we've mostly gotten right is the slow integration of policies and procedures as we've (more-or-less) needed them. Also, the fairly low barrier to administratorship. Also also, I think we're mostly getting our core properties right, for example instance of, subclass of, and part of right, which will help us integrate into the Semantic Web. The work done for language fallback is also going to lead Wikimedia in the right direction too, and is also really neat.
DangSunM
Bringing all the interwiki links to one place.
What have Wikidata's greatest shortcomings thus far been? Where does the project need to improve over the next year?
DangSunM
Lots of properties are useful only for enwiki because they are translated wrong or don't have labels in other languages.
Izno
Lack of phase 3 is killing us, and a lot of the fun stuff you can do with queries. Probably the lack of interlanguage participation. It seems like a lot of the decisions made are English-centric, which while it might be the lingua franca shouldn't imply that English contributors have a firm control over policy and guideline direction. A lack of a community decided data model. It's been hard getting people moving in a single direction with property creation and deletion. The UI design could use a lot of work too to make it easier for people to visualize relationships Oh, and finally, working with the wikis to get our data used!
John F. Lewis
In all honesty, there is nothing Wikidata has to improve on which is major really. It is just the small design things and the lack of a more user friendly interface for new users who don't understand the concept as is. Echoing what Izno said. The interlanguage participation is lower than I'd expect, however it is not a major issue as we don't discourage it. We have places where interlanguage discussions do take place but we as a community fail to make it more known to users who don't speak English.
Is there any message that you'd like to share with the Wikidata community and the broader WMF community?
Izno
We want people to use our data, that's what! It's going to take a lot of people looking at our data to make sure we get it right. More participation from the local WikiProjects would help a lot too, because they're the ones who know whether we've got data that they can use. And lastly, give us some time to grow up. Sourcing and unavailable [data] types shouldn't make us complete anathema. Come and experiment with adding something to Wikidata!
John F. Lewis
To the wider community; Wikidata is a really interesting and rewarding project to get into. Every edit you make will have an impact on any Wikimedia project when the respective phases are live as well as the linking to third party knowledge bases like Freebase. Wikidata tries to appeal to all to create an open global environment which helps towards Jimmy Wales' focus for Wikimedia. Wikidata is truly aiming to create a world where every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
Legoktm
I love all of you guys.
DangSunM
Thanks for helping wikidata! I specially thanks to our admin group and WMDE staffs to doing works for wikidata. You guys make the wikidata:D