Topic on Talk:Structured Data Across Wikimedia

Responding to call for Feedback. We need stuff, but not this.

2
Alsee (talkcontribs)

I happen to be a programmer, so I understand better than most what you are trying to achieve, and why. However...

First, there is the issue of the labor to do all this work. Where is that supposed to come from? We are already struggling to keep up with our existing work. Our - new articles sitting unreviewed in draftspace waiting for possible promotion to mainspace article - is currently backlogged by over three months with 3,195 pending submissions. New users are waiting up to THREE MONTHS to find out whether their article will make it into the encyclopedia. currently has a backlog of nearly 7000 unreviewed pages in mainspace. Our page has literally millions of tasks open. That barely scratches the surface of our work. If you make this new system - if the community were to accept it - it means we would spend less time creating new articles. It means we would spend less time expanding and improving existing articles. It means we would spend less time cleaning up bias and propaganda and misinformation and other crap that gets into articles. It means we would have less time available to assist new users.

Second, look at your mockup images:

I have one question. Look at that and tell me, are you making the wiki simpler and easier and more inviting for new users? Or does this make the wiki vastly more complex, more difficult, more confusing and overwhelming for a new user?

Third, related to the above point, English Wikipedia is currently stalled in an unresolved conflict on whether we want to ban use of Wikidata-in-Wikipedia. Structured data is designed by programmers for programmers. I'm a programmer, I understand why you like structured data, and how it's better suited for computer consumption. We understand the selling points for structured data, but Wikipedia is made by people, for people. The two systems are fundamentally incompatible. The Foundation's push to serve computers, rather than to serve people, is making things more complicated and more difficult. A substantial portion of the EnWiki community is ready to ban this kind of thing as disruptive to our work. Wikipedia is a human and volunteer project that happens to use some technology, not the other way around.

P.S. There is so much that we do want and do need. The Foundation has not been devoting enough time to maintaining and improving our core platform, and the Community Tech team is badly understaffed. There are countless projects there that aren't getting done.

Sannita (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hello @Alsee, and thank you for your thorough feedback!

I also wanted to let you know that the proposal you read on the project page is actually a bit outdated - we've heard similar feedback in the past from other users, and so we are in the process of working on a revision to the plan described that will take all of your feedback into account.

We planned on updating the page once we were done with the new plan, but in order to avoid further misunderstandings, I will put an advice on the relevant section right now to mark it as "outdated". Thanks again for your time, and we look forward for you to review our new plan in the future!

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