Topic on User talk:ChristianKl/Structured Discussions Archive 1

I gather from your User page that you have an interest in making sure new users feel welcome to participate. I would suggest that language such as this: "I object to your plan to blindly replace one value with another. P625 is, like all properties, capable of having multiple statements on an item, ideally one of these having best rank. There is nothing in principle wrong with coordinate values imported from a language wikipedia, and no guarantee that GNIS coordinates are an improvement on language wikipedia sourced data. Your definate preference for info as referenced by a third party source is noted, but you should appreciate that we hold a wealth of info as referenced by a third party source which on examination turns out to be complete horseshit. By all means add new data, but do not presume to remove data without proper examination and reason, and do not presume to make unexamined and uncompared data best rank" is not very welcoming and presumes to understand the amount of effort the poster put in. Further, for most of the follow up to be not a discussion of the policies with references but to reinforce that noobs just don't get it feels extremely cliquish in a teenage sort of way.

I do agree that the message wasn't welcoming, and would wish for people generally being more welcoming but that isn't easy to change.

Not everything that's consensus is written down in a policy in Wikidata. I do spent effort into writing new Wikidata policy to clarify issues.

Please see the follow up on this topic. It really does feel that the focus is to make new editors feel uncomfortable.

I think it fair to point out that I'm extra sensitive here because I have allready gone through rounds of harassment from Jura1 which was never effectively addressed. Tagishsimon seemed to pile on at the time which affected how I received his input.

Thanks for your help with this. In my experience, once people tar you with whatever labels they choose, it can be next to impossible to unstick yourself.

FWIW, I think if your interest is increasing the number of contributors than you would want to put a premium on contributions over kibitzers. My impression is that the community currently puts too much stock on random comments from people without a clear vested interest. This is more than likely to lead to one of two results: 1) People stop showing up for the discussion and simply go rogue and do whatever they like or 2) people simply leave the platform altogether. I'm pretty close to choosing the latter.

I have contributed over 90% of the US senate data at this point. The data had been left stale and inconsistent for years until I started contributing. The people with random comments and equally random commits now were making similar comments and commits during those years while nothing was being changed. I'm not saying this buys me carte blanche, but I am saying that it seems it would be in the best interest of the community to show a preference for people who put in the work as I did. Perhaps the assumption is that it wasn't work on my part but simply a mass data dump. That's simply not true. I spent many hours cross checking this information but more to the point, assuming a lack of effort is similarly discouraging for those putting in the work.

It's also worth asking why these conversations are driven to the relevant projects where people with a vested interest can convene rather than have everything discussed on an open forum where people feel free to offer drive by comments.

My guess is that you'll read this as bitterness and not how it is intended. If so than it seems to me to be an opportunity lost. I can always walk away. That's not the point. I haven't walked away because I'd prefer to have my work built upon. But if no one is stepping forward to put in actual labor then the comments come across as directives which seem out of place in a volunteer platform.

I may be wrong in my assessment and may not be around to see if I was or not, but I would imagine that proof of the pudding will be in the tasting. I.e. If you do NOT see contributors increasing this might be one place to look.

In contrast to Wikpedia, Wikidata has growth in contributors (with +10-20% per year).

The idea of kibitzing assumes that someone is just looking and not making edits. People who contribute on talk pages are valuable contributors. On average I think people don't contribute as much on community pages as is desireable.

There are many cases where a certain modelling decision is locally benefitial but globally produces problems. There's a tradeoff between consistency and flexibility and that's often not easy. In this case the property was create to allow the flexibility of different kinds of things to be stored and not have complete consistency.

How are you measuring edits? I'm suggesting it should be content specific. It's worth noting that nothing has been changed yet.

Edits are something that MediaWiki measures and you can see how different Wikiprojects are doing on it at https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/wikidata.org

I don't understand how that's relevant to my question. In any event, you don't seem interested in a discussion so we should probably drop it.

You asked how I'm measuring edits and I said that I use the metric that MediaWiki provides. It seems like a clear answer.

And I was asking about whether it's content specific. So I guess the answer is no? That doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I believe you're more likely to attract new contributors by building up communities around subject areas than to foster people who feel like commenting on areas they have very little engagement in. It seems obviously discouraging to a contributor who has done a lot of work in an area to not be given some deference as to the model being chosen.

Also, you were arguing that people were not kibitzing because they were contributors, but those stats seem to be more general than about specific users.

I do think KPI's are important. Those are the KPI's. There's value in having functional Wikiprojects and discussions. But that doesn't mean that discussions in project chat have no value. Sometimes it's the only way to actually get a discussion and find consensus.

Historically, the grant to the EveryPolitician people seems to have been bad for doing community building in politics on Wikidata.

I think the problem is that there seems to be a gap between the high level aspirations and the actual practice. FWIW, I'm new to Wikidata. I put my work in with EveryPolitician because that's what was there. There wasn't any other project and and I wasn't steered anywhere. It's clear that Jura has bad blood with the project, but I'm not sure why you seem to be saying that the consensus was that it was bad. In any event, none of that came up and there was no effort to make this about people with a clear vested interest in *some* related project, but rather (in my opinion) overvalued the opinions of people who put in next to no work on the topic material.

Moving forward, if there is some inherent flaw in EveryPolitician, it should probably be addressed. It wouldn't take much to simply put some header in the project to steer people away from it. For my part it doesn't seem very well developed, but the data on US senators was far less developed before I started working on it. I only got started on this because the example on the example query page for senators was returning nonsense.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician was the biggest grant for conduct production and it's results seem to be that it left a vacant project after it ran out https://www.mysociety.org/category/democracy/everypolitician/. There's no good reason for the project to be called EveryPolitician instead of politics or something like that.

I'm willing to move my work. Like I said, there was nothing else when I started. Also, as I mentioned the data was very spotty and inconsistent before I started, so I know there wasn't a lot of energy invested here by the every politician folks or anyone else. Still, I mostly am not interested in this history and am more interested in the data set and I stand by the case I made above. If you think I've miscalculated how invested other contributors are I'm happy to be set straight. As a new user, all I saw was Jura's harassment. (Let me know if you want references...) That's not a good look for the platform regardless of past missteps.

Now might be a good time to note that still nothing has come from the most recent Project chat discussion.