I agree that it is desirable that most persons should be represented by items. I would only say: it might be prohibitive to determine entity identity _prior_ to entering data. In the case of reference data in my experience this is the case: A single person may have published scientific articles as: "Wang Lin", "Lin Wang", "L. Wang", "L. R. Wang", depending on editorial practices of the journal; but 2 publications of "Wang Lin" and "Wang Lin" may be authored by different persons.
Gerard is very optimistic that the community can fix it, but there must be a workflow towards that rather than a all-or-nothing situation. Therefore: Is it possible to build flexibility into the UI so that a single property can be used with http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_items as well as http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_multitext ? I believe this would simplify the communities task of accepting new information in string form but attempting to ultimately normalize (e.g. persons) to items. The data model is already type-flexible; the documentation says " Note that it is not required that Value belongs to the Datatype that is currently given to the Property in the system. In general, the UI and API of Wikidata will only allow Values that match the given Datatype, but if the Datatype is changed, then it will not be possible to update all stored data immediately." However, in the UI such a multitype capability would have to be foreseen (not necessarily implemented in the next phase, but planned for). Gregor _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
