Hey,
As explained in the text, the aliases are not distinguished from other
property values in the data model right now. This was the status of the discussion when we last talked about this, but we can also re-introduce aliases as a special field (I see why this would be useful). Daniel had an argument against this, saying that many other property values could also work as aliases in certain domains (e.g. binomial names of biological species). So the special status of the alias in the data model was questioned.
Right, that makes sense to implement at some point if there really is demand for this. This is rather harder to implement then what we're currently doing and is blocked by phase 2 stuff and probably phase 3 stuff, while we want to have it in phase 1 already.
A while back we also had a related discussion where Daniel took the position that we should also not have special labels and descriptions. The conclusion of that was that we will have them but that we will make them accessible via the same interface as regular properties (at least for read ops).
if two items have the same description, can one of them use an alias that
is the title of the other?
Good question. Right now this is not enforced. Then again, right now aliases are not used anywhere for lookups except in the fulltext search thing, where this restriction is not really relevant. Denny, Daniel, any thoughts on this?
This is also based on a preliminary decision made a while back: the idea
was that properties, while not having Wikipedia articles, will still need unique string identifiers that can be used in wikitext (e.g. queries) where one does not want to address properties by ID or by "label+description" pairs.
This seems odd to me - you sure the term TitleRecord is being used consistently through the data model and this thread? I'm using it as "GlobalSiteId PageName".
I do agree you would probably not want to put label and description in wikitext, and that just the label might or might not be sufficient, even if they are unique per language. If you need an id that really is always unique you can just use the p12345 thing. Since most of the editing of these will happen via GUIs (right?) this seems to be quite acceptable. Or does anybody see a better approach? In any case, why would you resort to "GlobalSiteId PageName" rather then "label description"? What makes it so odd is that the "GlobalSiteId PageName" is meant to indicate equivalence of items across sites, which is rather different then using it to identify properties in wikitext.
It seems that a property could at best have a list of PropertyValueSnaks
(no auxiliary Snaks, no references, no statement rank).
Why not have a list of claims?
Cheers
-- Jeroen De Dauw http://www.bn2vs.com Don't panic. Don't be evil. --