The idea is that the mayor would not be represented as a String value, even for smaller cities, but always by an item. This would possibly lead to items that have no Wikipedia articles associated to them, but there is no problem with that.
But humans (and other entities) should not be represented by strings in the system, but by items.
Hope that helps with this, Denny
2012/8/14 Gregor Hagedorn g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com:
A city has a Wikipedia page and a corresponding Wikidata-item-page. One of the item properties is Property:City_mayor.
If the mayor changes, and both have their own pages/items (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_Diepgen to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Wowereit for http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin), changing the mayor would mean to disconnect/replace the item to item property. The change would be clean and logical with respect to translated labels.
However, where the city mayor is not a well known person (smaller cities), the City_mayor property is mostly likely a string literal.
Replacing the string (name) for the mayor in this case would require to empty ALL translations/transliterations in all other languages. Unfortunately, the system cannot really know whether an update of a translated label is the result of a correction (person did not change) or occurs as a result of changing the label.
The design of the UI should make this situation as transparent to editors as possible. It may help to provide two edit-buttons for language-sensitive string literals:
[edit translations] [edit new value] (or [replace value] ?)
In the second case, all existing translations would be blanked. Probably more or better ideas can be found... :-)
Gregor
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