On 11 March 2021 at 12:24 David Abián davidabian@wikimedia.es wrote:
Hi,
Although we usually claim that Wikidata entities and their URIs are stable, I believe that, unfortunately, their stability isn't as high as desirable in practice, or at least the risk of deletion, merging, redirection, redefinition of identity due to confusion or ambiguity, etc. exists and materializes too often (I hope I'm not being read by Wikidata haters :D). This happens with all kinds of Items, and it can happen with minority languages as well as with something as widespread as, for instance, Chinese.
On 11/03/2021 09:50, Lucas Werkmeister wrote:
Wouldn’t it be better to refer to them using Wikidata item IDs?
Not an area where I'm an expert. But there seem to be quite a number of standard IDs for languages, include some which are ISO, and P424 on Wikidata which is "Wikimedia language code".
I would say the default solution would be Z-numbers, and a Wikidata property for WA ID so that cross-walking to any other standard ID is just a Wikidata query away. If what is intended is an exact fit with P424 then that would be duplication; but I suppose in the end that won't be the decision.
Charles