On 30 September 2015 at 20:58, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com> wrote:

I think I've seen something somewhere saying that the prevailing sentiment is that obsolete identifiers which are just redirects to a new identifier should be removed.

I hope not. See my post at http://addshore.com/2015/04/redirects-on-wikidata/ Redirects should remain!

Also see http://addshore.com/2015/09/un-deleting-500000-wikidata-items/

There's also the case of sites like MusicBrainz which keep the non-canonical IDs without redirecting to the canonical ID, but will tell you which ID is preferred, e.g. Fritz Kreisler

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/590fcad4-2ba4-43bc-a22f-a4bb9b496fe8

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/627ac6c2-ee5c-4120-8af3-ab00345447f5

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/bf6d6ce1-ce88-40e6-9424-11d11d2e54ea

where all the tabs for the second two pages actually point to the first, canonical entry.

Is there an established policy for either the redirect or non-redirect case?

See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Deletion_policy#Deletion_of_items_.28Phase_I.29 which says "Items should not be deleted when - The item redirects to another item"

Also see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Merge#Create_redirect which says redirects should be created when items are merged

I'd argue that even the obsolete identifiers are useful for inbound resolution and reconciliation. Aggressively pruning them just makes more work for people, because they must resolve the identifier that they have in hand to its canonical form (probably by hitting the issuing authority) before using it for Wikidata lookups.

What do others think?

Tom

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