On 16.06.2014 20:28, Jeroen De Dauw wrote:
Hey,
That's a good question.
The reason we have
"entity-type":"item",
"numeric-id":"1"
is "for legacy reasons". This actually makes little sense any more, and is problematic in that it assumes all ids have a numeric part. That assumption will likely break in the near future when we add Commons support. It'd much rather have the json contain simply string "Q1" than an array with the above elements. The reason why this has not happened yet is that it is a big breaking change to users of our API. Due to Commons it looks like we will soon be forced to make such a change though. (Such a change will be announced well in advance of being deployed of course.)
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw - http://www.bn2vs.com Software craftsmanship advocate Evil software architect at Wikimedia Germany ~=[,,_,,]:3
Thanks for the answer. "Legacy" becomes a word I really encounter to often when working with wikidata Json -.-* So, since there will already be a change in the near future how about introducing a field for the used Json-schema version? Just something like: { "version": "2014-07-01", // blubb… usual stuff here }
Also: can we cut a bit of redundancy? If the ting has an id of the form "Q[number]" it is per definition an item. No need to mention that again. (The reason here is serialization effort, not deserialization in any way)
Is there any planned date when "soon in the future" will be? What would be the best way to join the discussion of the upcoming format? Is there a proposal anywhere? Also: the Json descriptions in the wikidata wiki seem outdated…
Sorry for the passive-agressive tune, but having to write a ner Json (de)serialization every quarter year is not that productive.
Best greetings Fredo Erxleben