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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

At the moment Wikidata isn't used/usable in Wikipedia at all, apart from coordinating the site links across languages.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the editor of Wikidata isn't easy to use, I think its interface is pretty straightforward.

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A specific example: Try adding a timezone to a city. That's something that make complete sense to do, and yet Wikidata gives almost no affordances on how to do it. To get even more specific, it doesn't give a suggestion on appropriate types of data (UTC +/-?, TZ Names?) and it's completely opaque how to deal with summer time (probably via a refinement, but it's not clear what it should be called).

I agree it's pretty easy to add a Freebase ID to a Wikidata ID. Unfortunately this isn't really that valuable, because it's easy to a machine to work it out too.

You can embed statements from a Wikidata item in the corresponding article on Wikipedia using the {{#property:…}} parser function. This is largely unused on the English Wikipedia, but some language versions already use this for their infoboxes – for example the infobox on this page is partially generated from Wikidata: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankara

Do you know why the English Wikipedia doesn't use it? It is simply because the English Wikipedia information is generally better than the corresponding Wikidata information?

I believe it's simply because no one has yet put in the effort necessary to start using it. It might be a conscious decision, but if it was discussed anywhere, I completely missed that.

(English Wikipedians in general are very "territorial" in my experience, so to speak, and rarely appreciate efforts that put some piece of "their" articles beyond their "jurisdiction", like Wikidata does. Editors from other language versions are a lot more welcoming.)

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