The place where these hints are vital is in the tool-tips that come up when somebody is inputting the value of a property.

It's a quick message to say "don't use that item, use this other item".

A section on the talk page simply doesn't cover it.

I suppose one could create a community property, as you suggest, but as you say the challenge would be then making sure the system software presented it when it was needed.  I suspect that things intended to be presented by the system software are better created as system properties.

   -- James,

On 05/11/2015 16:21, Benjamin Good wrote:

A section in the talk page associated with the article in question would
seem to solve this (definitely real) problem? - assuming that a would-be
editor was aware of the talk page.
Alternatively, you could propose a generic property with a text field that
could be added to items on an as-needed basis without any change to the
current software.  Again though, the challenge would be getting the
information in front of the user/editor at the right point in time.


On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 2:16 AM, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I have noticed this need for use notes, but it is specific to
properties, isn't it? I see it in things such as choosing what to put in
the "genre" property of an artwork. It would be nice to have some sort of
pop-up that you can fill with more than what you put in. For example I get
easily confused when I address the relative (as in kinship) properties;
"father of the subject" is clear, but what about cousin/nephew etc.? You
need more explanation room than can be stuffed in the label field to fit in
the drop down. I have thought about this, but don't see any easy solution
besides what you have done.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:51 AM, James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

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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