I have proposed several properties on Wikidata and discovered others by
browsing items. Using shortcuts I don't need to type in the full names of
things. Frankly there is no way I would be able to guess the property
labels in English, let alone any other language. I still need to go to an
item to look up both the property name and the property number I am looking
for. Many properties have an item that links to an article somewhere that
will tell you more, but most do not. I think it is important to keep to the
Q- and P- numbers in anything one does on Wikidata, since that is one of
the things it was designed to do, namely to create permanent identifiers
for concepts that flip around a lot in terms of wiki titles.

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hoi,
> You are right. However, Hay was critiqued for his approach. Arguably he is
> absolutely using the right approach for his use case.
>
> When you state that people have to go back to Wikidata, it is easier to
> search for a label than it is to search for an ID. When you are developing
> software and you use whatever technology, please appreciate that in the
> final analysis what you create is to be used. JSON, the REST API are for
> developers but it is a technique not a tool. What Hay demonstrates is a
> usable tool.
> Thanks,
>      GerardM
>
> On 1 December 2015 at 09:14, Stas Malyshev <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> > It may not be stable but it is what PEOPLE understand. What you can do
>>
>> This is not as simple as it seems. First, people usually understand only
>> one language version - thus, we'd have 200 URIs referring to the same
>> object, but that's not the main issue I see with it. The main issue is
>> that the name is not always trivial to guess - so you'd have to go to
>> wikidata and look it up anyway (especially if not all languages are
>> supported). And, also, if you use English name and somebody uses Russian
>> interface, they may not even know that's the same property without
>> looking up on Wikidata.
>> So yes, when displaying, label is what people want. But when using the
>> API - not so sure.
>>
>> > <grin> I salute the effort and I appreciate the critique </grin> however
>> > many approaches do not have ordinary people in mind but are from ones
>> > own perspective. When that is of a developer of a data scientist it is
>> > often correct but hardly usable.
>>
>> What you mean by "ordinary people" here? If you mean random person
>> selected out of 7 billions living on a planet, chances are they won't
>> know the first thing about what REST API is, what JSON is and what that
>> thing is all about. So we are talking about very specific narrow
>> category of people who do know what REST API is and need it and know how
>> to use it. So you can make some assumptions here which are not true in
>> general population, but may be true amongst REST-API-using population.
>> --
>> Stas Malyshev
>> [email protected]
>>
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>
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