On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 4:19 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On 01.10.2015 00:58, Ricordisamoa wrote:
>
>> I think Tom is referring to external identifiers such as MusicBrainz
>> artist ID <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P434> etc. and whether
>> Wikidata items should show all of them or 'preferred' ones only as we
>> did for VIAF redirects
>> <
>> https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot/SamoaBot_38
>> >.
>>
>
> Now if the external site reconciles the ids, we have these options:
> (1) Keep everything as is (one main id marked as "preferred")
> (2) Make the redirect ids deprecated on Wikidata (show people that we are
> aware of the ids but they should not be used)
> (3) Delete the redirect ids
>
> I think (2) would be cleanest, since it avoids that unaware users re-add
> the old ids. (3) would also be ok once the old id is no longer in
> circulation.
>

I agree #2 is best, although #1 could work too.  The problem with #3 is
that an identifier, once minted, is never "no longer in circulation."  This
is precisely why Wikidata items are never deleted.  There's always the
possibility that someone will hold a reference to it somewhere.  Thad's use
case isn't uncommon.

Is there any benefit in removing old ids completely? I guess constraint
> reports will work better (but maybe constraint reports should not count
> deprecated statements in single value contraints ...).


The constraint reports definitely need to be fixed.  I recently saw a
reference to a VIAF bot run that deleted a whole bunch of VIAF identifiers
to "fix" things being flagged by some constraint.


> Other than this, I don't see a big reason to spend time on removing some
> ids. It's not wrong to claim that these are ids, just slightly redundant,
> and the old ids might still be useful for integrating with web sources that
> were not updated when the redirect happened.
>

Rather than not wasting time removing, I'd like to see affirmative
statements that keeping them is a good thing.  If people find them annoying
or cluttering, it's because of poor UI design, not because they lack
usefulness.

Tom
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