That seems better to constrain the overall type of a qualifier to any property. It still doesn't feel exactly right, but I'm not sure what would. Now that I think about it more, for the case of heads of government it doesn't seem appropriate to use a qualifier at all to me. It would just be a list of items which are presumably people. Each of those items would then have a single date or list of dates for start of head of government and end of head of government. The qualifier would be redundant. It seems the downside to having everything be strongly typed like in Freebase is that you end up with really weird and specific entity types like "government leadership timespan" to try to capture all of the details that you want, and the downside to semi-weakly typed items in Wikidata is that you might end up with different items representing the same information with different properties or qualifiers. But I have faith that Wikidata will ultimately work and achieve stability and convergence for the most common types just like how template boxes naturally emerged on Wikipedia. And I think the key advantage of Wikidata is that it will achieve growth, stability, and convergence without suffocating from having too many weird and specific item types to try to bridge and glue different types of information together.
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:40:39 +0100
From: denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de
To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Expiration date for data
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
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