What to do about incorrect data?

[liampond]

@dchiller How should we manage incorrect data? Linnea has found instances where in The Session, Puerto Rico is listed as a country instead of an area. Should we go into databases and correct these where we find them? This could be a lot of extra work. Some other options could be leaving it unreconciled in Wikidata, or removing the entry entirely from our data. What do you all think?

[fujinaga]

For now, I wouldn't correct any errors in any imports. Reconcile them as best as we can. Note that we will be regularly semi-automatically importing datasets, so we can't check for errors every time.

[dchiller]

It's a good question too, I think, because you can reconcile "Puerto Rico" with WikiData just fine, and that entity in wikidata has a whole bunch of properties that note it's political status (eg, "unincorporated territory of the United States"). What that may impact here though is how we think about the Session's "country" column. Do we reconcile it with "country" in Wikidata? Or with some other location property that is more capacious?

[ahankinson]

The point of Linked Data is that you can describe a thing in a series of statements that are true, without all those statements necessarily fitting into a single schema.

The term reconciliation here isn’t really correct, it’s data normalization that you’re doing if you’re trying to put all things in the same bucket. Reconciliation is identifying one thing in your data is another thing in another dataset. Normalization is about making all the things in your dataset have the same shape.

[liampond]

Sounds good! Thanks for all your input