Hoi,It being a database you will find that someone in Germany will take care of a new mayor in German places and determines for every wiki using the same instance of that person and consequently such relations are implicitly available. When people choose NOT to use the benefits of a database, on their own head be it.
Thanks,
Gerard
On 14 August 2012 22:57, Gregor Hagedorn
<g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com> wrote:
> But humans (and other entities) should not be represented by strings
> in the system, but by items.
I wonder whether this would not be too inflexible. It would burden the
use of wikidata with the responsibility to determine entity-identity
in all cases where only a name-string is known.
In the example of the mayor: Assume that the new mayor of a city is
named "John Smith". Wikidata already has 500 items for persons named
John Smith. The Wikipedia-Wikidata editor must now determine whether
it is good practice to simply create wikidata-item 501, not knowing
whether it is one of these or not.
I fear that the practice is even more problematic in the reverse case.
If in a large percentage of cases there is little doubt about
identify, this could lead to the practice of always connecting to a
wikidata-item for a person, should there be a person of this name.
Henceforth, Wikidata would claim that the mayor of Erewhon previously
was councilor in Owd-Negrin, even if there is only a chance identity
of a name. Wikipedia disambiguation pages know how many homonymic
highly notable persons exist - Wikidata will deal with the non- or
less-notable ones as well.
A well known example is that it is not a good idea for scientific
reference management to treat authors as person entities, since the
"reverse engineering" of author identity from the n:m relation between
person and name-string is normally not feasible.
I would prefer if the decision whether entity-identity is known or
whether only a name-string or other label is known, should be left to
the Wikidata editor community, and not prescribed by the software.