Thank you very much for restoring the items.
I understand the notability criteria, but the current issue raises some interesting questions about how much time should be permitted before items are deleted. I intend to post my suggestion on the Wikidata mailing list, but would be interested to know what you, as a Wikidata administrator, think of them first.
As mentioned, the data – comprising painters and their paintings – have been provided by the Stadtmuseum Berlin. All the painters (and painters) were part of an exhibition at the museum in 2016. I uploaded the data in question on 2017-12-07. Some of the painters – including the 23 you deleted on 2017-12-24 – did not have GND IDs. But a few of those without IDs were not deleted. And so it was that an interested Wikidata user (via Mix'n'match) and a Wikidata bot had enough time to complement my rudimentary upload and provide IDs from other systems on 2018-01-26 (see, for example, Q44914563 and Q44915124).
I realise the painters without any external reference do not satisfy the notability criteria in the strict sense, because they have a minimal online footprint (or does "publicly available references" also include offline reference texts?), but they are notable in the sense of being items curated by a cultural heritage institution. The whole issue is made more complicated by the fact that the painters in question are all female painters whose life and works span about 350 years and who have been excluded from the historical record due to their gender.
I would suggest changing the deletion process as follows:
- All items that are deemed not to satisfy the notability criteria should be marked as "pending deletion" (or something similar) and the uploader should be given time to respond. I think this would be a more positive community-oriented approach than delete first and ask questions later.
- It is my opinion that the review period should be six months, in order to give the supporting Wikidata systems and users time to complement the data (in which case the deletion either becomes moot or the uploader has been able to argue their case successfully).
I am not sure how realistic my proposal is – perhaps I have misunderstood the process and all its complexities. Wikidata at the time of writing contains 50.291.192 items. By my calculations 1.142.667 items have been deleted since the creation of Wikidata, which represents about 2% of Wikidata.
If that is correct, then providing uploaders more time before their items are deleted should not put too much of a strain on the system. Does that sound plausible?
Thanks again for your time.