Notability in Wikidata has a different meaning as in Wikipedia. If an item is useful to express some information, then it at least fulfil structural needs and it is notable on Wikidata, fortunately, or it would be a bug headeach.

It is even said in the notability criteria that if we can clearly identify the concept, like with an id in some authority or national database, then it is notable. Mayor office of cities are amongst these identifiable items. This criteria also saves headeachs :) there is quite a lot of items in Wikidata, let's not take all the time to discuss the notability of millions of them.


2014-06-16 19:13 GMT+02:00 Derric Atzrott <datzrott@alizeepathology.com>:
> Good luck with your edit-a-thon today [1] and it would be awesome if you could
> introduce Reasonator and Wikidata while discussing Wikipedia. I think it is
> very interesting that you just discovered Magnus through Reasonator instead of
> the other way around - discovering more of Magnus through his Wikipedia tools.
> So few people venture outside of the text-oriented Wikipedia projects, it's
> always refreshing to see someone in a public-facing capacity getting involved
> in Wikidata.

Thank you! The Edit-a-thon went well.  I'll be putting a write-up of it on
English Wikipedia and Outreach pretty soon.

I really don't know many of the people who make the non-core tools.  I pay
attention to the talks that happen on Wikitech-l, but for some reason Magnus
doesn't really stand out in my head at all if he participates there.  I'm glad
now that I know who that he though.

I hope to help in any way that I can.

@Magus, I've submitted a pull request that fixes that problem I was complaining
about.  Its not an ideal fix, but its good enough to satisfy me.

> Hi Derrick, I think it's vain to ask yourself if some concept "deserves" an
> item. It does not make much sense. There is much more value in the regularity
> in how we express the same kind of data : this makes really much simpler to
> develop tools and to help newbies on how to do things if we decide one way on
> expressing that somebody is the mayor of somewhere and stick to it.

When I said deserves, I meant it in a notability sense.  Most mayor positions
are not in themselves notable, so it to me doesn't make sense to have a
Mayor of Frederick item if using the "of" qualifier on the "position held"
property will suffice.  Though that does leave a bit of irregularity because
of items like "Mayor of New York City" which as a position is clearly notable.

If we have the "of" qualifier, but don't use it and instead make many
"Mayor of XYZ" items, we might as well remove the qualifier.

Thank you,
Derric Atzrott


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