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It’s fairly difficult from the other side as well - contributing. I’ve been trying to complete wikidata from a few open source datasets I am intensly familiar with… and it’s been rather painful. WD is the sole place I have ever interacted with that uses RDF, so I always forget the little syntax I learned last time around. I have some pre-existing queries versioned, because I’ll never be able to write them again. I even went to a local Wikimedia training to get acquainted with some necessary tooling, but I’m still super unproductive compared to e.g. SQL.

It’s sad, really, I’d love to contribute more, but the whole data model is so clunky to work with.



That being said, I now remember I stopped contributing for a slightly different reason. While I tried to fill WD with complete information about a given subject, this was never leverage by a Wikimedia project - there is certain resistance to generating Wikipedia articles/infoboxes from Wikidata, so you're fighting on two fronts, you always have to edit things in two places and it's just a waste of everyone's time.

Unless the attitude becomes "all facts in infoboxes and most tables come from WD", the two "datasets" will continue diverging. That is obviously more easily said than done, because relying on WD makes Wikipedia contribution a lot more difficult... and that pretty much defeats its purpose.


> the two "datasets" will continue diverging.

You may be pleased to learn that there is a project underway that aims to largely solve that problem:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Bridge

The last piece of news I can immediately find is that it was deployed to the Catalan Wikipedia in August 2020, but I'm not sure what progress there has been since.


I have no problems with the data model, but sadly you can't insert RDF statements: you have to go through tools like QS and wikidata-cli and the WD update performance is dismal.

See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T290061, which I posted in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/5504/ for DataQualityDays2021




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