I agree that it is desirable that most persons should be represented
by items. I would only say: it might be prohibitive to determine
entity identity _prior_ to entering data. In the case of reference
data in my experience this is the case: A single person may have
published scientific articles as: "Wang Lin", "Lin Wang", "L.
Wang",
"L. R. Wang", depending on editorial practices of the journal; but 2
publications of "Wang Lin" and "Wang Lin" may be authored by
different
persons.
Gerard is very optimistic that the community can fix it, but there
must be a workflow towards that rather than a all-or-nothing
situation. Therefore:
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.
The data model is already type-flexible; the documentation says " Note
that it is not required that Value belongs to the Datatype that is
currently given to the Property in the system. In general, the UI and
API of Wikidata will only allow Values that match the given Datatype,
but if the Datatype is changed, then it will not be possible to update
all stored data immediately." However, in the UI such a multitype
capability would have to be foreseen (not necessarily implemented in
the next phase, but planned for).
Gregor