Hi Vladimir and Thad,

As to Thad's suggestion:

I think this is a bad idea, as it ties Black Lunch Table to Visual artists of the African diaspora in a misleading way. These artists are not specifically Black Lunch Table artists -- they are part of the effort to address a diversity gap on the various Wikimedia projects.

Similarly, would this be used for Women in Red's massive task lists, or other initiatives' task lists? It seems really wrong-headed in a fundamental way.

As to Vladimir's suggestion:

Yes: I think the category discussion should be re-opened.

Yes categories can be edited by all. But as far as I can tell, they are the only option here -- unless there is a better option beyond tagging items with BLT. Sorry I just don't see that as a practical or logical solution.

This is a great opportunity to create bridges and collaboration -- and most importantly outreach -- to the broader community between Wikidata and Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons at minimum. It's a potential to integrate the projects in a really complementary, productive way. I think that it is in Wikidata's best interests to support this type of community-building effort.

Best,

- Erika

Erika Herzog

Wikipedia User:BrillLyle

On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Thad Guidry <thadguidry@gmail.com> wrote:

Think about the use case differently...and what your really trying to capture.

To more properly allow flexible semantic relations for the Erika and heathart's use case as a best practice, you can just do the following:

Just create the BLACK LUNCH TABLE item in Wikipedia with a good description and add the property "subclass of" with "Event".. but in the future, BLACK LUNCH TABLE might be changed and thought of as an Organization ?...or if you think it really is more of an Organization now...then make it an "instance of" an "organization".

Then add the property "part of" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P361

on each Visual artist item and fill in "part of" with the BLACK LUNCH TABLE item.

Things to think about:

Was the Artist a "part of" the Black Lunch Table organization ?

Did the Artist "attend" one of the Black Lunch Table events on only 1 day ?

Are there multiple Black Lunch Table Events around the nation...are they "hosted by" someone, sometime, somelocation ?

...

see where I am getting at ?

You 1st need to understand and properly state in Wikidata what "Black Lunch Table" really is or what "Black Lunch Table 2017" means or what "Black Lunch Table, 2017, Boston, MA" means if it happens, and create an item for it and while doing so...think about the future of as well...and how it "Black Lunch Table" (whatever that THING is) might change as the movement/organization/events might spread or grow in scale.

Best of luck to all Black Artists out there !

-Thad

On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 10:16 AM Vladimir Alexiev <vladimir@sirma.bg> wrote:

> Is there another property that could be substituted instead on Wikidata?

 

Unfortunately no.

 

> the categories seemed so logical. 

 

It IS logical to use an existing category for this purpose.

 

But the WD community has rejected my proposal https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Archive/30#category (and the previous one “useful for / interesting to”) because:

- categories are a bit messy, since many people use them for various purposes

- synchronizing cat-item assignments between WD and Wikipedias would be a major hassle.

 

They even rejected having such property that is NOT synced with Wikipedias, for project purposes like

yours (Black Lunch Table) and mine (Europeana Food and Drink, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure).

 

WD does have a bunch of over-specific categoreies, e.g. “people born/died/buried here”. See

https://tools.wmflabs.org/sqid/#/browse?activepage=1&type=properties&lang=en&propertylabelfilter=category

 

Does anyone think we should reopen this discussion?

 

_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata