Hi Markus,

I think there must always be some way to make an item unique. A way to identify the item outside Wikidata. This can be a sitelink, for subjects located on a fixed location on Earth it are the coordinates, etc. But only coordinates without knowing what the subject is does not make sense either. In some way the item must be able to be identified somewhere somehow.

This subject can be compared with the subject of what we (on nl-wiki) see as basic statements that need to be added to be able to identify a subject on Wikidata and to be able to differ it from another subject. (To be able to answer the question: the article X is not connected to Wikidata, to which item should it be connected?)

For everything instance of. For geographical situated subjects we request the country, located in the administrative territorial entity, location (for towns, etc), coordinates. For people gender, birth/death date/place, occupation, country. For living creatures the taxonomic rank, scientific name, parent taxon. For creative works the author, date.

Romaine

2015-05-29 17:42 GMT+02:00 Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org>:

Hi Jane, hi Romaine,

I think we agree that valuable information should be kept if at all possible. My chief concern is that orphaned items do not have a clear identity. It's not useful to know that "something" is at a certain location. The first thing we must determine is what this "thing" is that we are talking about. Links to Wikipedia are a good way of doing this. Without them, we need to come up with other identity providing sources. We certainly have the right infrastructure for this (with all the identifier properties that point to other databases and authority files).

The first goal of anyone who wants to safe an orphan should be to connect it with the outside world so as to give it some grounding to build on.

A weaker way to provide basic grounding is to make internal connections. There are cases where this is strong (one can identify items as "the author of War & Peace" or "the mother of Marie Skłodowska-Curie"), but there are other cases where it is too weak ("the town in Germany" or "the part of Europe" do not identify anything). One would need to give this more thought if one wanted to determine automatically if an item receives its identity from the incoming/outgoing links to other items.

Cheers,

Markus

On 29.05.2015 17:05, Romaine Wiki wrote:

Hi Markus,

Indeed yes, that is also an issue. It can happen with new articles and
with older articles.

Some articles get deleted as they are a duplicate of another article, or
worse written (to bad to keep), or not an encyclopaedic subject to have
in an encyclopaedia.

Every day, on nl-wiki we check new articles if they are connected on
Wikidata. Almost all articles that have a template that marks it as
nominated for deletion we ignore and we do not add them to Wikidata. On
nl-wiki we do this by hand, to make sure all basic statements are added,
but if this is done by bots, you get a situation that they may not check
for templates that mark articles for deletion.

If an deleted item has statements, the question is if this information
is at itself valuable to keep to be used and/or for the future.

Romaine

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