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the only way for an editor to correct an outdated statement is to remove information (e.g.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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