On 16 June 2014 21:04, Derric Atzrott datzrott@alizeepathology.com wrote:
The "of" qualifier is (IME) currently used for cases where we don't have "X of Y", so we use "X" of "Y" - position held: "mayor" of "Frederick" rather than "mayor of Frederick"
Once we have the more specific property, we can just switch over and stop using "of" qualifiers.
So would be practice be to use "Mayor" of "Frederick" or to create a new item "Mayor of Frederick" and use that instead?
Assuming notability (he waves his hands frantically) and assuming you're going to have enough of them to make a reasonable list, then "Mayor of Frederick"
And if best practice is to use "Mayor of Frederick" why bother with the "of" qualifier in the first place?
Like you say, you may not have a suitable property and not want to create one :-)
We also have to deal with things that aren't appropriate for a single unified property.
This could be because they're very minor - for example, consider something like "position held: vicar". We may well have an item for the parish or the church - so "position held: vicar [of] St. Ethelred's" - but the item on the specific post of vicar-of-this-parish would be too specific to be worth creating.
Alternatively, they might be too precise or too ephemeral - it would be reasonable for the item on Neil Armstrong to want to record that he held the position of mission commander on Apollo 11, but "commander of Apollo 11" was only ever a temporary thing, a position held by one person, and so there's not much point creating the item for it!
The time where the query engine will be ready and fully operational will be a great help and will ease to normalize the datas and we will know which query are the most elegant, which models are resonably general to limit the number of patterns used in Wikidata. This time has not came yet imho.
So at this point we just don't know which is the better way to go about this then? That is fair. For the moment I think then I'll stick with "Mayor" of "City" rather than making new items for each cities mayor. It will be relatively easy for a bot to switch those over later on if we decide the other way is best, whereas it might not be as simple the other way around.
FWIW, I did this for all members of the Lok Sabha (Indian lower house of parliament) about a month ago (member of: LS > member of LS). As you say, pretty simple to do :-)