Theoretically multitext could be replaced, but I would not like to do that. A property like "Tagline" for a movie or motto for a country might make sense to be a multitext. Yes, you could make the tagline of a movie an item -- but do we really want to require it to be an intermediary item? The subtitle of a book? The ring name of a wrestler?
Monotext is irreplaceable, though, and it means a simple string without a language designation. Something like "Chemical symbol", I guess, would be a monotext, or ISO 3166 code. A intermediary item could not do the job in that case.
Therefore I think we should not get rid of monotext and multitext.
Cheers, Denny
2012/8/15 Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com:
Basically what Daniel proposed is, that it would be best practice that for every string that refers to a concept, event, thing, person, unless the editor is certain about item identity, a new wikidata item entity should be created.
I could imagine this as a possible and perhaps elegant solution. My concern is the handling of unknown identity and a workflow towards improved identity recognition, not a discussion string versus item.
Could it be that the types http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_monotext http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_multitext become redundant then? Is it possible to simplify the wikidata model by specifying that all language-specific strings are to be represented by an item that keeps the translations together? I find this appealing...
Gregor
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