Jayen466
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@Jayen466: Hi Andreas. I am taking this way away from enWP, to talk about referencing well away from controversy. I have very lightly skimmed your article, and will endeavour to revisit when I have time to sit, read and reflect.
I can say that I am a perpetrator of non-referencing of WD items. 1) Generally many target items are not available to reference (these birth records, those death records, those census records of that county for that place and time, etc. and creating them is a PITA. 2) The records can come from research which I reference on author talk pages the edits and this is hard to capture at WD, and system is definitely not set to manage such research, and citing an enWS talk page is not reputable. 3) Damn nuisance to add references repeatedly and properly, eg. if I use the local DNB article for biographical detail or a country's probate records, and there are multiple data points to add, manually it more than doubles the work to do per data pair ... birth date, place, death date, place, parent(s), sibling(s), honours(s), education, academic then to add the work, the volume, the page <aaaagh> 4) Lack of clarity for what needs referencing, eg. I use Magnus's Authority Control tool to add that data/links, and my understanding is that they don't require referencing, if they do, then maybe we should be getting Magnus to have that component added to his tool
I can think of solutions that would suit me, though that would need other people who could have the time to build and support tools. Anyway, there is some light general first thoughts for you to do with as you wish. You know where to find me if you seek further opinion. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:44, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for your post, billinghurst. I am unfamiliar with Magnus's tool (maybe I should have a chat with him sometime; we live in the same town), and don't do the sort of work you do, but I think I can relate on the most basic level to the existence of PITA problems. :)
- Looking at Author_talk:Frederick_Mort, am I correct in assuming that you are transcribing old physical records? If so, as these will be out of copyright, one possibility might be to take photographs of them and upload them to Commons, along with a description of where they are held and can be viewed by anyone wishing to verify them. This would give you a simple URL to add as a reference in Wikidata (and you could post the images on talk pages here, as well, instead of having to type everything in). And if all photos of records from a particular institution are part of a dedicated Commons category, staff of that institution could perhaps be prevailed upon to check new additions from time to time to verify that no one has added bogus ones.
- I know there are efforts underway to create Wikidata items for sources (see Dario's presentation, linked at the bottom of the op-ed). If those efforts materialise, they might help, too, in cases like the DNB. Best, Jayen466 (talk) 17:00, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
- Magnus's tool d:Magnus Manske/authority control.js
- This is generally transcription of primary data (maybe scraped from record sites, or transcribed by me), and you will see that I am adding record citations. Individually they are correct, though not necessarily helpful as for the more obscure people the corpus of the data is what generates the identification of this person in place and time. So the skills and logic of a people finder / researcher go from being overt and challengeable to being a disparate list, without the linking data, and reducing ability to challenge.
- While you are correct that I could take copies of the records, you would be extending the amount of work that you are asking to be done to what is approaching a monumental task (and away from the primary goals that I seek). So while it might be good for your project, it is a piecemeal and MAKE WORK approach for all, and I would submit unsustainable without a lot of benefit for the other projects. Reminding you that WPs do not allow primary research, so it can be argued that it is not usable at those sites. For the WSes we utilise the data to primarily provide evidence of copyright, and to allow collection of writings where a full bibliography has not been compiled, and we are starting that primary task.
- Just don't have the time and bother to write the essay. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:17, 12 December 2015 (UTC)