On 28.11.2015 16:51, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Gerard Meijssen, 28/11/2015 07:05:
A big city is what? A city with more than a given number of inhabitants? If so it is redundant because it can be inferred.
Criteria might be defined by local law and/or require some administrative act. That's how it works in Italy, for instance.
German actually has a noun "Großstadt" ("big city"), which has a fixed meaning to be a city with at least 100,000 inhabitants. The noun is now widely used as a native expression in everyday German, unlike the descriptive English translation "big city" (which feels to English speakers like "große Stadt" would feel to German speakers). It is an example of a concept that natively exists in some languages but not in others.
The important clarification to Gerard's reply is that this is not a case of an over-specific Wikipedia category that somehow became a Wikidata class. Rather, it is a concept that is natural to some languages and not to others. It's a challenge for Wikidata to deal with this, clearly. Nevertheless, from my point of view, a classification that integrates concepts from many cultures/languages is preferable over many disjointed classifications that are perfectly aligned with one particular culture/language.
Markus