We will have a time datatype, and every property is strongly typed. This is
also true for properties used as qualifiers.
Regarding the priority of qualifiers: very high. They are the next major UI
feature to be deployed, and as far as I can tell from the progress of the
team it looks like they will be deployed in April.
Cheers,
Denny
2013/3/20 Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>
I disagree, and fully concur with Tom: a generic
string type for a
datetime qualifier defies the purpose of making wikidata statements
well-formed and machine-readable.
I don't think we should enforce typing for *all* qualifiers and I second
the general "organic growth" approach, but datetime qualifiers strike me as
a fundamental exception. Would you represent geocoordinates as a generic
string and wait for "organic growth" to determine the appropriate datatype?
I appreciate the overheads of adding datatype support, but this decision
will have a major impact on the shape of collaborative work on wikidata.
Denny – on a related note, I wanted to ask you what is the priority of
qualifier support relative to the other items you mentioned in your list.
As I noted in my previous post, the only way for an editor to correct an
outdated statement is to remove information (e.g. Lombardy: head of local
government: -Roberto Formigoni +Roberto Maroni ): this information will
then be lost forever in an item's revision history. The sooner we introduce
basic support for qualifiers, the sooner we can avoid removing valuable
information from wikidata entries just for the sake of keeping them
up-to-date.
Dario
On Mar 15, 2013, at 10:09 AM, Michael Hale <hale.michael.jr(a)live.com>
wrote:
For most of the scenarios I can think of, parsing the dates out of strings
that are in a standard format by convention will be much easier. The number
of ways people will want to use qualifiers will increase like the number of
properties and items. So the way I see it, we have to support string-based
qualifiers at the minimum. Then I think we should only support strongly
typed qualifiers if performance requires it. By setting an update polling
frequency on templates that use the information I don't think we'll run
into performance issues for most scenarios. Even with this example the
qualifier type is a date range, not just a date. So do we want them to have
to choose from a large, fixed list of qualifier types or just look at a
similar example and set a string to something similar and then gradually
enforce types on the most popular uses that we see. I think this type of
organic growth as opposed to trying to guess the qualifier types in advance
is exactly in the spirit of Wikipedia.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:58:38 -0400
From: tfmorris(a)gmail.com
To: wikidata-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Expiration date for data
On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Michael Hale <hale.michael.jr(a)live.com>
wrote:
Yes, I think once qualifiers are enabled you would just have something
like:
...
Property(head of local government)
...
Value(Elizabeth I) - Qualifier("1558-1603") - Sources()
Value(James VI and I) - Qualifier("1603-1625") - Sources()
...
...
There was a discussion about whether qualifiers should have specific
datatypes other than just string, but I think we should only do that if
needed.
Clearly the example that you gave is one where non-string datatypes are
critically important. If you don't know that they're dates, you have no
way of telling when they were in those roles.
Tom
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