Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-13/Blog

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  • Beyond the sarcastic jokes and playful vandalism by enthusiastic fans is the more serious and constant problem of the insidious vandalism of sports statistics and information on player's bio's. The intention of the vandal is to trick the unsuspecting sports fan and our reader into believing false information. Without the careful and vigilant watchfulness of hundreds of concerned editors to rehabilitate these abused articles, these "traps" would lay in wait for their next victim. Anyone that watchlists sports articles will verify how often these articles are attacked. Buster Seven Talk 17:51, 16 January 2016 (UTC)Reply
Actually, this could be one place where Wikidata and automated systems could help. A lot of sports statistics (and statistics in general) could be brought in automatically from external databases to Wikidata, and distributed to the articles via templates - if we could find enough Wikidatans (Wikidaters? Wikidatoi?) interested in sports. Then, bots could also check whether the data is correct - less work for humans. This could be good also for Wikipedias in other languages where people wouldn't have to seek data in less reliable sources if they could be sure that Wikidata has it correctly, translating the templates would suffice. --Oop (talk) 19:06, 17 January 2016 (UTC)Reply