Wikidata talk:Strategy 2017/Cycle 3

Discuss the draft strategic direction

Week 1 Challenge: How do our communities and content stay relevant in a changing world?

• To the extent that non-Western people don't want to consume content with western-centric norms, it's up to the Wikipedia projects in their native languages to set their own norms. enwiki has very specific norms and likely won't change those norms to be more popular in Africa, but that doesn't mean that other Wikipedia's in African native languages have to share the same norms. ChristianKl (talk) 13:14, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
• I was going to assert that the world isn't really changing much, but I kind of see the point in the context and stories provided. There is still a need for trusted information sources, and wikimedia serves an important role there whether young people realize it or not. The one thing I think would be most helpful is for wikimedia to emphasize "verifiability" of information, more than "reliability", going forward. That is, when an assertion is made, provide the context/source in a way that the user can actually verify that the assertion is true. Wikidata has a strong ethic of verifiability for its statements, which are themselves short snippets rather than the lengthy articles of the wikipedia's. Point directly to open primary sources to support statements of fact, as well as to reliable third-party analyses. ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:44, 5 July 2017 (UTC)
• On a meta-level, I thought that the point of this movement strategy conversation was to come together. Choosing to talk about how the "Western encyclopedia model" is not serving the needs of people, seems to be an antagonistic choice. It's very hard for me to understand that choice given that the reception of the movement conversation within the Wikimedia community wasn't that great, to begin with. It seems like the interest of the person writing this piece is social justice activism and not creating a healthy conversation within the Wikimedia community around questions that actually matter for the community. ChristianKl (talk) 11:30, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
  • I disagree. As the writer says, not everyone wants an encyclopedia. So we need to build other project to offer then what they want. That doesn't mean that Wikipedia will be killed, just that there's a world beyond Wikipedia, waiting to be explored. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:38, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Week 2 Challenge: How could we capture the sum of all knowledge when much of it cannot be verified in traditional ways?

• In wikidata we have been having discussions very much along these lines of questioning what is useful to keep as a source reference for a piece of information (see several recent RFC's and discussions in Project Chat). While there is some debate, I think there is a general consensus, which I favor, of keeping all sources that have distinctive information in some form or other, and just indicating clearly what that source was. If the source of a piece of information is oral tradition, if we can provide a link to a transcript or audio recording of the supporting statement as reference, that seems perfectly appropriate. If there are several conflicting claims for a piece of information, provide all of them with the best one or two sources available for each claim. In cases where there is strong consensus of sources in favor of one claim but one or two that say something different, there should be a way to indicate this strong asymmetry without completely suppressing the dissenting voices (for example wikidata uses a "deprecated" ranking to allow some claims to be given lower credence than others). In general, the wikimedia movement should favor increasing the range of sources used across the board so that good information is not lost to outdated standards of "reliability". ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:06, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
  • "There should be a way to indicate this strong asymmetry without completely suppressing the dissenting voices"- Unfortunately, that's not enough, or even easy to do. If an article says "there is scientific consensus in support of evolutionary biology", creationists will claim that the article is biased, even if creationists are also mentioned in the article. --NaBUru38 (talk) 21:42, 24 July 2017 (UTC)
• In many Wikipedias there is an insistence on sources in the language of the Wikipedia. This effectively limits the content of a Wikipedia. I have proposed regularly to compare different sources on the same subject and when they agree, it can be inferred that the information is likely to be correct. Only when differences occur, we need to be much more vigilant on sources and seek to remedy / curate the differences. When you consider that we do translate from English and consequently sources in other languages are accepted.. This should be a two way street. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:08, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Week 3 Challenge: As Wikimedia looks toward 2030, how can we counteract the increasing levels of misinformation?

This is an important problem to address. I read the linked research analysis, but there's really only one of the proposed solutions that strikes me as likely to be practical and helpful: "Track developments in journalism and academia for new ways to fact-check and verify information that may be used as sources for Wikimedia platforms, ..." - I'm doubtful on the "AI" front. AI's can be too easily gamed (and applied against us). But I think wikimedia does need to have an ongoing and active role documenting how to fact-check and verify things - as technology improves, it becomes ever easier to create things that "look like" real reports of something but may be either highly biased or outright fabrications. How do we recognize these problems and fight against them? We need to keep improving our tools for this purpose, and it would probably be useful for wikimedia to host some sort of central repository of tools and techniques for verifying sources or detecting that they have been fabricated in some way. ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:37, 17 July 2017 (UTC)