Harassment consultation 2015/Ideas/Interwiki link removal problems in Wikidata

Project idea

Idea by:Tomchiukc

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

When doing interwiki in Wikidata, there are conflicts about whether an article in a certain language is suitable to link in another language. For science topics, the solution is often clear: Either split or combine, as there are objective references about whether two articles are in fact talking about the same topic in different languages. However, for humanities topics, there is often no such an objective reference. This is especially true in Asia area, while the same Han characters collection can refer to totally different things. For example: "切手" means "stamp" in Japanese, but means "cutting hands" in Chinese. In fact, we knew that such problem also happens in European languages, for example, magnus princeps" in Latin and megas archon in Greek can be translated into English as Grand Duke or Grand Prince in English. When conflicts happened, editors usually try to resolve in English at specific locations. Some editors choose to discuss in their talk pages. Some languages set a specific page for non-speaking editors to discuss problems in other languages, say, English. In most occasions, such resolution solves the problem. However, in the Wikipedia of some languages, user have difficulties to comprehend in another language. User had to look for users who comprehend in that particular language to seek for resolution. This is often not easy, and the opponent were not willing to accept such arbitration and insisted that the other party do not understand their language and thus have no rights to do such change. In the past, when resolution cannot resolve, editors usually override the changes in their own languages with their correct interwiki links. When interwiki migrated to wikidata, however, these editors who do not accept arbitration keeps on reverting others' edit in Wikidata and responded with strong words. This is a kind of harrasement by reverting changes only from a specific user, no matter one thinks such editing is correct or not.

What is your solution?

We need a mechanism to arbitrate such conflicts. The decision of such arbitration shall be authoritative and need to follow. If one decided to refuse and keep on reverting others' edit in Wikidata, that can be considered a form of vandalism and is subjective to disciplinary action.

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