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
--
Daniel Kinzler, Softwarearchitekt
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