Contradictions within Wikimedia projects
Identifiable contradictions between Wikipedia articles of different languages and other Wikimedia pages is a phenomenon that could be used for improving accuracy, spotting errors, fixing outdatedness, improving categorization, and further things. It's a subject of ongoing research and development.
Often, there are contradictions between items of Wikimedia projects such as the categories of a Wikipedia article in one language and the Wikipedia article in another language. Sometimes, these contradictions are fine, sometimes they could be used for discussing which of several options or generally some change would be best, and most often it means there is some issue to solve – such as of miscategorization. This is an overview, systematically integrating and describing this. Please use the talk page to discuss this subject.
Types of contradictions and research
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- Contradiction between the categories of two language versions of a Wikipedia article: e.g. German Wikipedia has category 1980 deaths while English Wikipedia has 1982 deaths – how to best visualize this concept / is there file(s) that show this?
- Contradiction between text contents of two language versions of a Wikipedia article: I heard about the idea of, basically, having LLMs read the language versions of Wikipedia articles and showing which things in the article may contradict with other language versions – is there any media on this?
- On English Wikipedia there is a template for contradictions between ENWP articles which puts articles into en:Category:Articles contradicting other articles (explanatory diagram & page missing). There also is this new research project do detect such: Research:Wikipedia Inconsistency Detection
- There is this preprint study about a tool that identifies articles contradicting themselves in the text
- There are sometimes contradictions between the data in Wikidata and Wikipedia, specifically the data in Wikipedia's infoboxes and/or categories – there doesn't seem to be a tool to list these so users can correct either / sync them; maybe somebody knows of an example to screenshot to explain this assuming there's no better way to explain this
- On Commons, categories of a file or a category can contradict each other (in some cases it's not perfectly clear but all or nearly all videos here are either in English or German but not both)
- en:Category:Wikipedia categories tracking Wikidata differences
Coordination of efforts
[edit]Maybe a WikiProject, or task force, or tool(s), or media coverage? This could be considered a class of Wikimedia contribution types – a class where tools could be especially useful, e.g. via creating reports like c:Commons:Database reports/Category cycles. There doesn't seem to be any organized effort or comprehensive tool that works at scale.
Media
[edit]Media about this can be found in c:Category:Contradictions within Wikimedia projects.
Please add explanatory and statistical media about this. See the Commons categories.