I would say that GND is a “good enough” answer.
Most named entities are persons, organizations, events, creative works and places
and these are all mutually exclusive. There
ought to be a system interlock to prevent confusion between
them.
“Organism Classification”
or whatever you call it should also be on the list, because of
prevalence.
One thing I’d add to
that is fictional character because there are a (1) lot of them and (2) they can
be ontologized more-or-less in parallel with people, and (3) you’ll get
cleaner people if you keep fictional characters out. (On the other
hand, there are fictional events, places, etc. too, though
these are not so well documented.) Is it easy to add a new GND
type?
I think
you’re calling the “wastebin” category term, which is reasonable (I’d call
it a “concept”.) Going much further than this you’ll run into Borges
encyclopedia style risks, but aren’t the categories named in GND upwards
of 80% of the topics? Can you run a report on this?
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2013 2:19 PM
Subject: [Wikidata-l] A solution with finality is needed for P107 -
maintype (GND)
I
have just closed a second deletion discussion for Property:P107 - main type
(GND).
As with the first discussion, it is clear that there is a broad sense that
main type (GND) is not an ideal solution, however as it stands now, a large
enough portion of the community does not want to get rid of it unless/until a
replacement system is found or developed. For this reason, I closed the
discussion as no consensus and opened up a request for comment on the matter of
finding a replacement for P107.
I have gone to the unusual step of emailing the mailing list for three
reasons. First, P107 is the most used property on the project, and it or its
replacement will (most likely) remain the most used property on the project
forever. Second, the GND has evolved into a component of how Wikidata is
structured; our lists of properties are sorted by GND type, and that has a real
impact on what properties are used on what pages. The third reason is that, as a
general statement, participation levels in requests for comment have been
downright sad. Three or four people participating in an RfC is, for a project of
this size, unhealthy, and most RfCs don't get more than that many people
participating in them. For something this important, we need at least a dozen
people, preferably at least twice that.</rant>
Yours,
Sven
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