User talk:Elisfkc

Welcome to Wikidata, Elisfkc!

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Best regards! Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 00:14, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Removal of claims with sources

Hey Elisfkc, for the second time now I’ve seen that you had removed claims with valid sources from Wikidata [1][2]. Special:Contributions/Elisfkc indicates more cases on items I do not watch.

Those sourced claim removals should not happen at all. Please use ranks if you would like to prefer one of the existing claims over the others. In case of questions feel free to ask here. Regards, —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:12, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@MisterSynergy: I have been noticing a lot of person entries with multiple birthdays. That is what I have been changing, based on the date found on English Wikipedia. From now on, I'll only delete it if it is a duplicate or it is the less specific date (like having 1961 and 1961-04-24 as the birthdays). Elisfkc (talk) 17:42, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, roughly like that. However, we shouldn’t even remove “less specific dates” if they are backed by an external source (example). Always keep in mind that we collect all data that can be referenced, not all data that is correct. As already indicated, we use ranks to further qualify contradicting or multiple claims. Ranks do indeed directly influence which claims are delivered to data users (in Wikipedias and via Query Service).

If contradicting claims are sourced properly and we cannot invalide any of these claims, we can’t really do much to solve the situation here at Wikidata – even if we know that obviously a person only has one date of birth for instance. Sometimes one could prefer one date over the other(s) if there is for instance a majority of sources in favor of that date. But that’s not always the case, then we need to work with multiple normal rank claims.

Duplicated data (identical value + qualifier) can be deleted of course. If one cannot find any evidence for a given unsourced claim (not imported from any Wikipedia, and no source given), one could also remove the claim in many cases, as long as there is a source-backed alternative given. MisterSynergy (talk) 18:32, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@MisterSynergy: Ok, so I am ok to keep doing what I was doing before, as long as there isn't a source attached to the date I'm deleting? Elisfkc (talk) 18:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

If there are contradicting claims, it might be worth to (briefly) look for sources. In the case of the two reverts by me, this is exactly what I did some time ago. I saw that there were multiple values for dates of births, which is generally not possible of course. However, I found the given sources and added them, which resulted in the current situation. None of the claims seems to be more robust than the others (thus normal rank for all claims), and English Wikipedia (as well as all other Wikipedias) typically just pick one out of the available dates without any justification of their choice. Wikipedias perform really bad in these cases, but it is admittedly not really their job to provide all values that are given somewhere out there in the world.

Back to the topic. In many cases, there are contradicting values for a reason: most given values have been claimed somewhere, and they somehow found their way to the Wikimedia universe. Unfortunately, the source was not given in Wikipedia or Wikidata, or not transferred from Wikipedia to Wikidata. That’s why it is always valuable to check for external sources in Wikipedias and via search engines such as Google. If nothing can be found, you can assume vandalism or mistakes (such as typos, etc), and indeed remove the “unsourceable” claim. It would be the best to subsequently remove it from all Wikipedias as well, otherwise it might be re-imported at some point in the future again. Regards! MisterSynergy (talk) 18:52, 10 April 2017 (UTC)