I have been wondering about the practice of putting use-notes in item descriptions.
For example, on Q6581097 (male)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6581097
the (English) description reads:
"human who is male (use with Property:P21 sex or gender). For groups of males use with subclass of (P279)."
I have added some myself recently, working on items in the administrative structure of the UK -- for example on Q23112 (Cambridgeshire)
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q23112
I have changed the description to now read
"ceremonial county of England (use Q21272276 for administrative non-metropolitan county)"
These "use-notes" are similar to the disambiguating hat-notes often found at the top of articles on en-wiki and others; and just as those hat-notes can be useful on wikis, so such use-notes can be very useful on Wikidata, for example in the context of a search, or a drop-down menu.
But...
Given that the label field is also there to be presentable to end-users in contexts outside Wikidata, (eg to augment searches on main wikis, or to feed into the semantic web, to end up being used in who-knows-what different ways), yet away from Wikidata a string like "Q21272276" will typically have no meaning. Indeed there may not even be any distinct thing corresponding to it. (Q21272276 has no separate en-wiki article, for example).
So I'm wondering whether these rather Wikidata-specific use notes do really belong in the general description field ?
Is there a case for moving them to a new separate use-note field created for them?
The software could be adjusted to include such a field in search results and drop-downs and the item summary, but they would be a separate data-entry field on the item page, and a separate triple for the SPARQL service, leaving the description field clean of Wikidata-specific meaning, better for third-party and downstream applications.
Am I right to feel that the present situation of just chucking everything into the description field doesn't seem quite right, and we ought to take a step forward from it?
-- James.
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