Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Wikidata/Stable data

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Stable data

  • Problem: It is my firm opinion that the control of incoming data and of changes to the data stored in Wikidata does not work as well as it should. What is a tiny edit on one of Wikidata's ~ 40 million items can cause wrong information to appear in many thousands of pages in more than a hundred other projects, even those which chose to have flagged revisions as part of their quality control. There are many examples where the threat of vandalism not being detected is significantly higher than the possibility that the information provided actually needs to be changed (for instance: Chiapas is located in Mexico), some information is actually timelessly true (such as population numbers from a census at a specific date in time). Allowing such stable data to be actually stabilzed and only be changed under circumstances yet to be defined could not only increase Wikidata's reputation as trustworthy database but also increase its usage, while it lessens its vulnerability.
  • Who would benefit: Wikidata as a whole (reputation, usage), Wikidata volunteers, other projects' volunteers (less need to focus constantly on changes to Wikidata items), readers (don't get wrong information)
  • Proposed solution: Develop some kind of flagging single data on Wikidata (i.e. not the whole revision, but a specific statement)
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

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