Hoi,
The complaint that Wikidata serves an in-crowd is something that I feel is
correct. It follows from being overly interested in the academic side of
things. All the work by the professional developers is for esoteric things
and much if not most of the work does not translate into things that
benefit the people who are actually involved in Wikidata. To add insult to
injury when the argument is made that users will benefit from particular
improvements those improvements are denied typically because of secondary
use considerations. This is why we do not have automated descriptions for
instance. Recently the format of the dump changed but only secondary use of
Wikidata benefits. A lot of work was done on query but in 10 months we have
not seen any result. When the "featured article" functionality was
introduced it was not by WMDE developers, the same is true for the label
lister, the order of available labels ...
So far official Wikidata development is mainly backroom work. Maybe
important, but because of the lack of interest in the user experience and
productivity there is no idea and probably no interest and expertise in how
to make the regular editors and the noobs happy and productive. It is not
as if there is no example how it could be. The tools by Magnus serve
EXACTLY the same data to a user. They are intended for use by people and
they do generate a lot of contributions. These tools are only hampered by
the lack of stability of the labs environment however they do provide a
user centred experience.
I salute the fact that Wikidata wants to become more user friendly but it
starts with understanding what people need and how people work. The agenda
for these things could make it easy and obvious for people to move with the
flow of change. There may be moments when there is a break with standard
practices for technical considerations.That will not happen often when the
focus is on the use of Wikidata.
I have stopped arguing about Wikidata development and user experience
because every time other considerations have the priority. For me many of
the features of the Reasonator are must have for Wikidata. The most urgent
one is that we ALWAYS see a label in whatever language. I do recognise
English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish etc names. Why have
numbers when there is no label in Dutch? This one feature alone prevents
people from using Wikidata in the the 270+ other languages Wikidata
supports.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 12 October 2014 04:01, Romaine Wiki <romaine.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
For more than a year I am asking users to add their
articles to Wikidata
when they have written it. That seems succesful, they added their articles
more and more and did understand how to do that. Until recently. Now I get
more and more complaints from users that they do not understand any more
how to add a newly written article to an item. They seem to have tried, but
fail in actual getting it managed. That is a worse development!
Romaine
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