Interesting appreciation... I didn't draft it with lexical information in
mind. If we are struggling to make it different, perhaps there is no
difference?

Thanks,
Micru


On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> Nice. However, it is not something we can cope with at this time. It makes
> sense to first be able to include lexical items because what you are
> getting into is firmly in that area.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
>
> On 3 June 2014 20:30, David Cuenca <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Continuing with the discussion of last week about the nature of
>> properties I follow with my personal crusade to foster a better
>> understanding of Wikidata (which sometimes means asking difficult questions
>> :)). This time I ask about items, or concepts for that matter.
>>
>> To start with I cherry-pick a very insightful question posed by Markus
>> last week, that unfortunately I left unanswered:
>> "The main question is "Did the reference say that pianos are
>> instruments?" but not "Did the reference say pianos are instruments because
>> of the definition of 'piano'?" Therefore, we don't need to put this
>> information in our labels."
>>
>> To my mind that is a problem that, as the chicken and the egg, can be
>> settled with just a word: emergence. There is no such thing as a piano or a
>> concept of a piano. But both of them, concept and object, co-evolved over
>> time and now we recognize certain objects as "pianos". Timeline:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano#History
>> There have been so many innovations upon innovations, versions, and even
>> name changes, that what we call now "piano" is very different from what it
>> was long ago. Same can be said about other concepts like "country of
>> citizenship", which is not a valid concept when talking about historic
>> people.
>>
>> When we are creating an item we are capturing a moment of time of the
>> past, according to a source in a different past. Eventually this item might
>> change its label, change its meaning, or become obsolete. So when I look in
>> Wikidata for:
>> - a way to reflect label changes over time: yes, that will be possible
>> with the mono-lingual datatype + qualifiers, creating a property "label"
>> - a way to reflect that the concept is obsolete: perhaps it could be
>> reflected with start/end date
>> - a way to indicate a different item with a related meaning: it can be
>> done with properties
>>
>> This information is not about the item itself, but we treat it as other
>> statements.
>>
>> In my opinion these kind of statements are different (as labels, or
>> descriptions), since they don't refer to the represented entity, but to the
>> container that represents the entity. Like the walls of a bubble.
>> I can imagine that there will be some confusion between labels that can
>> accept qualifiers, other than don't, and aliases that can edited in one
>> language but not in other, and all this not grouped with other statements
>> that belong to the same metadata group.
>>
>> So I candidly ask: does it make sense to treat item metadata statements
>> just as any other statement? Would it bring more confusion or less?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Micru
>>
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>
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-- 
Etiamsi omnes, ego non
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