I've just completed #100wikidays, and my 100th article was about a
horse: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12003911 That horse is the
grandfather of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20872428, but should I
use the same properties as for humans?

We also have https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12331109 and
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12338810, who were father and son.
Again: Do we have animal properties, or do we use the same as for
humans?

Regards,
Ole

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> Having gone and written the RFC
> (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Merging_relationship_properties)
> I've just discovered that we *did* have this discussion in 2013:
>
> https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata%3AProperties_for_deletion&diff=44470851&oldid=44465708
>
> - and it was suggested we come back to it "after Phase III". I think
> the existing state of arbitrary access should be able to solve this
> problem, so I've added some notes about this.
>
> Comments welcome; I'll circulate notifications onwiki tonight.
>
> Andrew.
>
> On 24 August 2015 at 14:02, Lukas Benedix <benedix@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>> +1 for genderless family relationship properties.
>>
>> Lukas
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Thanks again for your comments. It looks like:
>>>
>>> a) there's interest in simplifying this;
>>>
>>> b) creating automatic inferences is possibly desirable but will need a
>>> lot of work and thought.
>>>
>>> I'll put together an RFC onwiki about merging the "gendered"
>>> relationship properties, which will address the first part of the
>>> issue, and we can continue to think about how best to approach the
>>> second.
>>>
>>> Andrew.
>>>
>>> On 17 August 2015 at 12:29, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I've recently been thinking about how we handle family/genealogical
>>>> relationships in Wikidata - this is, potentially, a really valuable
>>>> source of information for researchers to have available in a
>>>> structured form, especially now we're bringing together so many
>>>> biographical databases.
>>>>
>>>> We currently have the following properties to link people together:
>>>>
>>>> * spouses (P26) and cohabitants (P451) - not gendered
>>>> * parents (P22/P25) and step-parents (P43/P44) - gendered
>>>> * siblings (P7/P9) - gendered
>>>> * children (P40) - not gendered (and oddly no step-children?)
>>>> * a generic "related to" (P1038) for more distant relationships
>>>>
>>>> There's two big things that jump out here.
>>>>
>>>> ** First, gender. Parents are split by gender while children are not
>>>> (we have mother/father not son/daughter). Siblings are likewise
>>>> gendered, and spouses are not. These are all very early properties -
>>>> does anyone remember how we got this way?
>>>>
>>>> This makes for some odd results. For example, if we want to using our
>>>> data to identify all the male-line *descendants* of a person, we have
>>>> to do some complicated inference from [P40 + target is male]. However,
>>>> to identify all the male-line *ancestors*, we can just run back up the
>>>> P22 chain. It feels quite strange to have this difference, and I
>>>> wonder if we should standardise one way or the other - split P40 or
>>>> merge the others.
>>>>
>>>> In some ways, merging seems more elegant. We do have fairly good
>>>> gender metadata (and getting better all the time!), so we can still do
>>>> gender-specific relationship searches where needed. It also avoids
>>>> having to force a binary gender approach - we are in the odd position
>>>> of being able to give a nuanced entry in P21 but can only say if
>>>> someone is a "sister" or "brother".
>>>>
>>>> ** Secondly, symmetry. Siblings, spouses, and parent-child pairs are
>>>> by definition symmetric. If A has P26:B, then B should also have
>>>> P26:A. The gendered cases are a little more complicated, as if A has
>>>> P40:B, then B has P22:A or P25:A, but there is still a degree of
>>>> symmetry - one of those must be true.
>>>>
>>>> However, Wikidata doesn't really help us make use of this symmetry. If
>>>> I list A as spouse of B, I need to add (separately) that B is spouse
>>>> of A. If they have four children C, D, E, and F, this gets very
>>>> complicated - we have six articles with *30* links between them, all
>>>> of which need to be made manually. It feels like automatically making
>>>> symmetric links for these properties would save a lot of work, and
>>>> produce a much more reliable dataset.
>>>>
>>>> I believe we decided early on not to do symmetric links because it
>>>> would swamp commonly linked articles (imagine what Q5 would look like
>>>> by now!). On the other hand, these are properties with a very narrowly
>>>> defined scope, and we actively *want* them to be comprehensively
>>>> symmetric - every parent article should list all their children on
>>>> Wikidata, and every child article should list their parent and all
>>>> their siblings.
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps it's worth reconsidering whether to allow symmetry for a
>>>> specifically defined class of properties - would an automatically
>>>> symmetric P26 really swamp the system? It would be great if the system
>>>> could match up relationships and fill in missing parent/child,
>>>> sibling, and spouse links. I can't be the only one who regularly adds
>>>> one half of the relationship and forgets to include the other!
>>>>
>>>> A bot looking at all of these and filling in the gaps might be a
>>>> useful approach... but it would break down if someone tries to remove
>>>> one of the symmetric entries without also removing the other, as the
>>>> bot would probably (eventually) fill it back in. Ultimately, an
>>>> automatic symmetry would seem best.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts on either of these? If there is interest I will write up a
>>>> formal proposal on-wiki.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> - Andrew Gray
>>>>   andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> - Andrew Gray
>>>   andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
>
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