On 09.09.2014 11:33, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Am 09.09.2014 01:40, schrieb Denny Vrandečić:
Create a third item in Wikidata, and use that for the language links. Any
Wikipedia that has two separate articles can link to the separate items, any
Wikipedia that has only one article can link to the single item.

That's a nice solution for the language link problem, but modelling the
relationship of these three items on wikidata is kind of annoying/tricky. How
would you do that?

Before the "how?" should come the "why?". The modelling should be chosen so that it best suits a given purpose (the purpose is the benchmark for deciding if a particular modelling approach is "good" or not). I guess the main thing we want to achieve here is to link the combined item to and from the single items. If this is true, then the "how?" question is basically a "which property to use?" question.

For this we should look more closely at the nature of the combined item. Let's distinguish "combined items" that are natural and meaningful concepts from those that are just different topics combined for editorial reasons in one article. The first kind of item involves things like bands (who have members, possibly with individual articles, but which are still meaningful concepts by themselves). The second kind of item involves the Wangerooge hybrid, but also many other things (e.g., plane crashes and the planes themselves; or people and events the people where involved in).

The problem with these second type of complex item is that it does not give you a good basis for adding data (you can't say properly which aspects of the thing you are talking about). It is also problematic since these things are not natural concepts that can be considered to have certain "joint properties". Rather, they are a kind of editorial trick to organise information in Wikipedia articles. For this reason, I would suggest to have a property for making links in this case that clearly refers to Wikipedia. Like "is a list of" or the item for "Wikipedia disambiguation page". I would avoid using properties that are normally used with real concepts, such as "has part" (which would make sense for "bands" -> "band member", but not for "Wangerooge hybrid" -> "Wangerooge island" (it's not a part since the former is not a proper concept to start with).

With such a editorial property, one could then also create items for parts that don't have Wikipedia article so as to be able to add data that would be confusing/wrong in the combined item.

Markus

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