Wikidata selection of Cultural Heritage, Stars, Galaxies and Random entities and claims

This work presents an analysis of the use of different representation methods in Wikidata to encode information with weaker logical status (e.g. contradictory information, temporally evolving information). The study examines three main approaches: ranked statements, null-valued objects, and qualified statements with properties P5102 (reason of statement), P1480 (sourcing circumstances) and P2241 (reason for deprecated rank) by analysing their prevalence, success, and clarity in Wikidata. The analysis is performed over cultural heritage artefacts stored in Wikidata divided in three subsets (i.e. visual heritage, textual heritage and audio-visual heritage) and compared with astronomical data (stars and galaxies entities from Wikidata) and a Random dataset (entities chosen randomly from the most used 100 classes). The findings indicate that (1) the representation of weaker logical status information is limited, with only a small proportion of items reporting such information, (2) the representation of WLS varies significantly between the two datasets. Finally, we propose several representation alternatives to simplify and standardize the representation of this type of information in Wikidata, with the hope of increasing its accuracy and richness