On assessing weaker logical status claims in Wikidata cultural heritage records

Abstract

This work analyses the usage of different approaches adopted in Wikidata to represent information with weaker logical status (WLS, e.g., uncertain information, competing hypotheses, temporally evolving information). The study examines four main approaches: non-asserted statements, ranked statements, non-existing valued objects, and statements qualified with properties P5102:nature of statement, P1480:sourcing circumstances, and P2241:reason for deprecated rank. We analyse their prevalence, success, and clarity in Wikidata. The analysis is performed over Cultural Heritage artefacts stored in Wikidata, divided into three subsets (i.e., visual heritage, textual heritage, and audio-visual heritage), and compared with astronomical data (stars and galaxies entities). Our findings indicate that (1) the presence of weaker logical status information is limited, with only a small proportion of items reporting such information, (2) the usage of WLS claims varies significantly between the two datasets in terms of prevalence and success of such approaches, and (3) precise assessment of WLS statements is made complicated by the ambiguities and overlappings between WLS and non-WLS claims allowed by the chosen representations. Finally, we list a few proposals to simplify and standardise this information representation in Wikidata, hoping to increase its clarity, accuracy and richness.