mkroetzsch added a comment.

@daniel It makes sense to use wikibase rather than wikidata, but I don't think 
it matters very much at all. We should just define it rather sooner than later.

As for the versioning, I don't see how to convince you. Four more attempts:

- Try to apply your proposal to the MediaWiki API: "Every API action should 
contain the MW version number." I think from your experience with MW it should 
be easier for you to see why this would be a bad idea. RDF is the same, but it 
affects a lot more APIs.

- Another argument is that, of course, changing URIs does not give users any 
warnings about the change either. Their queries will just return different 
results, but there won't be any error message or the like. This behaviour is 
exactly the same as for other kinds of breaking changes. You just add a new 
kind of breaking change that is sure to break everybody's usage (not just the 
users' who use BCE dates, to stay in your example), but the breakage is still 
subtle and hard to notice in a running system. URI versioning does not 
implement any kind of "fail fast" principle that you would want for announcing 
breaking changes. There is no standard way of announcing breaking changes via 
an RDF or SPARQL API; you need to work on your community communication to get 
this done (e.g., one could send notes about breaking changes well in advance to 
wikidata-tech and gather feedback).

- You gave an example where a well-informed group of experts decided against 
your recommendation. I know of many other examples where URIs were initially 
created to contain a version number that was then never changed even after 
major updates (FOAF for example), again because experts in the field deemed 
that this was a sensible way to go. I would also claim some expertise in this 
area. Your view is natural for somebody who has not worked much with 
ontologies. Many smart people have thought similar ten years ago (you can see a 
lot of "0.1" and "1.0" version numbers in vocabulary URIs. Even the SMW 
ontology includes a version number in the URIs; of course it also never 
changed). Experience shows that the case where you would ever want to do such a 
drastic thing is the case where you use completely new URIs anyway (and 
probably give the project another name, too).

- You could always decide to do the versioning later on if you must. There is 
no problem going from URIs http://wikiba.se/ontology#... to URIs 
http://wikiba.se/ontology-2.0.0#.... There is no standard way of encoding 
version information in URIs and you would not write a SPARQL query to extract 
it from there. However, in most cases, if you really change the meaning of one 
URI, you would rather use a new URI for this one thing only and keep all the 
other URIs as they are.


TASK DETAIL
  https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93207

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To: mkroetzsch
Cc: adrianheine, Manybubbles, Smalyshev, mkroetzsch, Denny, Lydia_Pintscher, 
Aklapper, daniel, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Krenair, Dzahn



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