Property 'Official name' with datatype 'monolingual text' has already been approved but is waiting for that datatype before it is created. It is designed for the use you described - listing the various official names with qualifiers for language, start date, end date etc. No matter what your language is set to you will see this name in the official language

This leaves the label as a simple label, reflecting general usage, localised into as many languages as required.

Lots of location items change over time. Boundaries change, names change, statutory rights change. If we create a new item every time there is a minor change it would get silly so there has to be some scope for using qualifiers to reflect those changes over time. The question is merely at what point that breaks down and you really need to have two separate items. For me the basic principal is that you need two items if you can't describe it in one item.

Joe


On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:19 PM, David Cuenca <dacuetu@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, that is one part of the problem, which could be addressed in Wikidata with a property "official name" with the datatype mono- or multi-lingual string (planned, but not available yet) plus the qualifiers start/end date.
The other part of the problem is that for different periods of time you have different entities attached to geographic locations.

For instance after the "Kingdom of Great Britain"
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q161885

Came the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland"
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q174193

Yes, the name changed, but it it not just a name change, it is a different entity.

Cheers,
Micru


On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk> wrote:

I think the problem is that we sometimes need to reflect more than just the single official name - at the moment we include multilingual names, which is great, and it's a bit of a backwards step to lose that ability for the past. Imagine if you're looking at an English or German map of Russia - all the names rendered with nice Latin-script equivalents - and you say "okay, show me a 1970s map", only for everything to become Cyrillic instead. :-)

It becomes more complicated if you have cases where the name changes in some languages and not others, or countries with multiple official languages where it changes in both.

For example, we'd want to be able to record that in English the city of Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad on a certain date, and then later became Volgograd, just as we record that in Russian it went from Царицын to Сталинград to Волгоград.

However, as you can see at the moment, the "other names" are simple strings with no dates or modifiers, so we can't convey this information. (Switching the interface to a different language will display the alternative names in those languages)

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q914

Susanna: I'm not aware of what the plans are for this, but I'm reasonably sure we can't do it right now. However, I'm not completely up to speed on how dates/modifiers etc work, so someone on wikidata-l can no doubt correct me :-)

Andrew.

On 20 March 2014 13:24, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Am 20/mar/2014 um 13:51 schrieb Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk>:
>>
>> Properties can have modifiers such as date, labels can't. So there's a
>> bit of a challenge here - we would be able to construct a field that
>> says "historic name : Warschau (date:1939-45)", but this would be
>> shown as a historic name in Polish, German, English, Chinese...
>
>
> maybe that's not a problem as this was indeed the official name in that time?
>
> cheers,
> Martin

--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk


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