What are the implications of this for sidebar links ?
IMO it's a good thing if the wikidata items become more fine-grained and
more conceptually precise.
But wouldn't this mean we would be losing (some) sidebar links, so
people wouldn't necessarily know any more that some of the information
they're reading might be available in a language they might prefer.
A classic case is where some wikis have separate "concept" and "list"
articles for a thing, whereas others have "list with concept" articles.
This often gives rise to disputes as to what should be interwiki'd to
what.
(OT: should a "list with concept"-style item ever be acceptable as a
target of P301 'category's main topic' ?)
So: should the sidebar of the wiki page in a language that has a
separate article for the concept also include a new section "related
article" that could eg present "list with concept" articles from
languages with no direct concept <-> concept equivalents.
Similarly one wiki might include an article on an individual artist; but
in other languages the best information on that artist might be
presented in an article on the family of the artist; or a small
tight-knit group of related artists.
Would a mechanism that could offer such articles from languages where
there was no direct equivalence be worth considering, if we start
plumbing in properties like "has topic" ?
-- James.
On 09/09/2014 12:36, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
My proposal became more clear to me over lunch:
For articles that are really about multiple different things that cannot
be reconciled in a single natural concept:
* State "intance of:Wikipedia article with multiple topics" (we already
have several other classes of Wikipedia articles).
* Use some property, say "has topic", to link to items about the
individual topics.
* Optionally: use a property like "subject of" (P805) to link back from
the individual items to the multi-topic pages.
The main proposal here is to treat these things like Wikipedia
disambiguation pages: we have items, but the items are mainly about the
page, not about any real-world concept we care about.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoan_Clipper
It says "Samoan Clipper was one of ten Pan American Airways Sikorsky
S-42 flying boats" but it includes an infobox that lists "fatalities".
So the article describes both a specific airplane (the flying boat) and
an event (crash of that plane). We should not try to invent a new
concept of "machine-event system" to capture this, but have two items
for the two things we have here.
We will have many cases where this is not necessary if we can find a
natural "composite concept" that it makes sense to talk about. In these
case, we will use different properties for the links (for example, a
country article may sometimes be used to describe all the federal states
of that country, yet we have a good way of linking individual state
items to the country). As usual, there will be corner cases where it is
not clear what to do; then we need specific discussions on these cases.
Cheers,
Markus
On 09.09.2014 11:57, Markus Krötzsch wrote:
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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