[Tagging] RFC: remove alphanumeric code visible in infoboxes at OSM Wiki linking to Wikidata

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 16:46 2022-04-02, Martin Koppenhoefer đã viết:
> 
> 
> sent from a phone
> 
>> On 3 Apr 2022, at 00:47, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>>
>> But I tried to fix some structural issues on Wikidata
>> in past and it was not easy, and I am not planning to
>> spend my time on it.
> 
> 
> this is also my experience, it is very complicated to fix wikidata, first you have to find what is already there, often different items which are partly overlapping, and you would have to somehow merge or link them, or create meta items which link them. There is also the issue that you can only have one wikipedia article for every item, and IIRR you can also have the same wikipedia article only once in wikidata.
> For example in OpenStreetMap there is a distinction between place as a socio geographic object and administrative entities, in wikipedia both concepts usually or often are treated in the same article (this is less relevant for wikidata on tag pages, but demonstrates the kind of problems you run into, and is relevant when you want to link OpenStreetMap data to wikidata). Wikidata is easy when you deal with persons, e.g. find all women painters of the 19th century, because it is clear what is one person, but it is less clear when it comes to geographic and political entities, where the notion what they are or what is meant change and can be ambiguous. What is “Rome”, a city? A municipality? A province like area with a special status? Is the Vatican city part of it? Politically it is not currently, culturally it is.
> 
> Another example for the city realm: in wikidata, the city of westminster is an instance of a city, in OpenStreetMap it is not. What is your suggestion how this could be fixed?
> 
> Maybe everything can be fixed, but from an OpenStreetMap perspective, wikidata is often a mess, specifically for geographic entities, and we are here to enjoy mapping in osm, not to loose our time in an uphill battle with wikidata bots. Adding “instance of” properties to wikidata objects has an infinite complexity, you could follow link after link, and reflect about the meaning, and maybe also refrain from adding the link, or not because  tomorrow some bot will come along and add it without hesitation anyway ;)

One will always encounter rabbit holes aligning any two data sources to 
make equivalent distinctions, whether they're open databases like 
Wikidata, government data sources provided as-is, or proprietary 
datasets that data consumers might need to consult in various ways. I 
hope no one is under any illusion about OSM's established tags being 
remotely adequate for describing POIs. [1]

Not every real problem demands an immediate fix. I don't see anyone 
insisting that mappers put down what they're doing and fix Wikipedia and 
Wikidata, just as Wikipedians and Wikidatans aren't being told to put 
down what they're doing and clean up crufty, duplicative GNIS POIs in 
OSM. That said, I'm bullish about Wikidata being able to clean up its 
overconflation problem faster than OSM because of its acceptance of 
common-sense batch editing (not to be confused with bot editing).

> I am all open to let people link wikidata and OpenStreetMap, but these are really just hints for loosely related concepts, and every measure to avoid the misconception that we are looking at the exact same thing is welcome, therefore I support Mateusz’ initiative to remove wikidata from the infoboxes, while retaining the link somewhere less prominent.

I'm also supportive of / resigned to this proposal for different 
reasons, but I don't think we should set such a high bar that only 
strictly semantically equivalent concepts can appear in the infobox. 
Otherwise, we would have to ditch many of the infoboxes' photos, even 
the ones that get the reader 95% to the point of understanding.

By the way, a Wikidata purist would insist that everything is relative 
and an item's statements are only second-hand accounts of claims made by 
other authorities. In principle, if some book claims Westminster is a 
"city" by its own criteria, then Wikidata can say that that book claims 
Westminster is a "city". In practice, most people don't have the time to 
apply that kind of epistemology consistently, but it does happen for 
contentious topics. I would hope that a typical user of the OSM Wiki 
would fall somewhere between these two extremes in their interpretation 
of any Wikidata link.

[1] See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NAICS/2022 and weep.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us