Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_men_make_a_tiger
and: Habermas's Theory of Truth and Knowledge http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#HabTheTruKno :) On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Nikolas Everett <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks: so Stas and I've spent two days talking to the wikidata folks and > I've learned some fun stuff. I'm sending this email to this mailing list, > because, well, I just have to write this down and this list cares about > things. Maybe they'll care about this thing. I'm not sending this to > wikidata's mailing list because I'm not really confident enough to send > this to experts yet. > > Anyway, the most interesting bit that I learned so far is that the > Wikidata team claims that Wikidata doesn't describe truth. That might seem > like a silly difference at first but you start to get into trouble when you > want to query it and don't understand that. Think about it this way: > there are multiple values for the Jesus's birthday > <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q302#P569> and wikidata actually doesn't > claim that either of them are true, just that they are *according to some > sources*. Look also at George Washington's spouse > <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23#P26>. She has a qualifier - the date > of their marriage. These qualifies are like preconditions to the truth. > Kinda. They aren't always used that way but you can sort of pretend. > > But we can emerge from Cartesian doubt! Wikidata has some concept of > "true enough for most uses" called "best rank" > <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Ranking>. Its a reasonably simple > concept that amounts to "the community decides". So the plan is to > implement queries against that first. This should be good enough for > wikigrok initially and faster to implement and query because it allows us > to ignore things like qualifiers and references. > > Nik > > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-Core mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-core > >
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