I have proposed several properties on Wikidata and discovered others by browsing items. Using shortcuts I don't need to type in the full names of things. Frankly there is no way I would be able to guess the property labels in English, let alone any other language. I still need to go to an item to look up both the property name and the property number I am looking for. Many properties have an item that links to an article somewhere that will tell you more, but most do not. I think it is important to keep to the Q- and P- numbers in anything one does on Wikidata, since that is one of the things it was designed to do, namely to create permanent identifiers for concepts that flip around a lot in terms of wiki titles.
On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, You are right. However, Hay was critiqued for his approach. Arguably he is absolutely using the right approach for his use case.
When you state that people have to go back to Wikidata, it is easier to search for a label than it is to search for an ID. When you are developing software and you use whatever technology, please appreciate that in the final analysis what you create is to be used. JSON, the REST API are for developers but it is a technique not a tool. What Hay demonstrates is a usable tool. Thanks, GerardM
On 1 December 2015 at 09:14, Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi!
It may not be stable but it is what PEOPLE understand. What you can do
This is not as simple as it seems. First, people usually understand only one language version - thus, we'd have 200 URIs referring to the same object, but that's not the main issue I see with it. The main issue is that the name is not always trivial to guess - so you'd have to go to wikidata and look it up anyway (especially if not all languages are supported). And, also, if you use English name and somebody uses Russian interface, they may not even know that's the same property without looking up on Wikidata. So yes, when displaying, label is what people want. But when using the API - not so sure.
<grin> I salute the effort and I appreciate the critique </grin> however many approaches do not have ordinary people in mind but are from ones own perspective. When that is of a developer of a data scientist it is often correct but hardly usable.
What you mean by "ordinary people" here? If you mean random person selected out of 7 billions living on a planet, chances are they won't know the first thing about what REST API is, what JSON is and what that thing is all about. So we are talking about very specific narrow category of people who do know what REST API is and need it and know how to use it. So you can make some assumptions here which are not true in general population, but may be true amongst REST-API-using population. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@wikimedia.org
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