On 15.08.2012 14:25, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Is it possible to build flexibility into the UI so that a single property can be used with http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_items as well as http://wikidata.org/vocabulary/datatype_multitext ? I believe this would simplify the communities task of accepting new information in string form but attempting to ultimately normalize (e.g. persons) to items.
I think that would be a very bad idea, precisely *because* it would encourage people to use strings instead of item references whenever they are not sure about the item (or too lazy to look). If we have a "mayor" property, it should be an entity reference, and nothing else.
However, the frontend should make it very easy to create new entities on the fly. I.e. if you don't find the Major when you type in he name, you can just choose to create an item for that name, without even leaving the page.
This may indeed lead to the creation of duplicates (multiple items describing the same thing). But that can easily be detected once people start to connect the entity with Wikipedia pages, because of conflicting interlanguage links. And it can easily be fixed by merging the items.
The same thing may happen btw when the system createws a new item in order to link two wikipedia articles when both had no prior connection to wikidata. There's no way to tell whether an item describing the concept is already in wikidata - so a new item is created. When it turns out that this item is a dupe, the two items can be merged into one.
-- daniel