Hi Gregor, thanks for your great comments! I am trying to answer them here. 2012/7/5 Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn(a)gmail.com>om>: It is not. There is a canonical form. This does not mean it is the only one, but every other form can be canonicalized into the canonical one, and tools should work with that. (This is the same meaning as with titles in Wikipedia: whereas both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama are URLs for the article on Barack Obama, only the latter one is canonical -- the first one is just a convenience URL). Originally this comes from a limitation in XML: the local part of a QName must not start with a number, so we prefixed it with a letter. As most export formats should also work in XML, we took that as an important enough restriction to make it move into our Identifiers. Furthermore, using a letter like Q which is rather seldom otherwise increases the likelihood of a Wikidata ID being recognized with little context (i.e. in a text, Q7237 will be in the end more readily recognized as a Wikidata ID than 7237 alone). This is for merely technical reasons. Both URLs are convenience URLs anyway. The canonical one is the one with the ID. Added comment there. In short, the current proposal is actually more consistent over all the Wikimedia-projects, which means it is inconsistent how it is handled "internally" within the Wikipedia-projects. This means that the current suggestion is more or less what the software already does, and does not require much additional implementation. Cheers, Denny -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

Very delayed reply but think I'm still confused on this. Made a picture to clear my mind but not sure it works: http://smethur.st/wikidata The bit I think I get: If I request http://en.wikidata.org/wiki/Berlin Or http://en.wikidata.org/title/Berlin I get a 301? to: http://wikidata.org/title/en:Berlin The html wiki page But not sure I understand the machine readable part [1] Bullet point 1 says http://wikidata.org/id/Q{id} Resolves to the appropriate url depending on the request header Does resolve mean a redirect? Is that a 303? Or is there no redirect and the "thing" uri returns content? What's the "appropriate url"? http://wikidata.org/data/Q{id} Or http://wikidata.org/data/Q{id}?format={format}&language={language} ? Bullet point 2 says http://en.wikidata.org/item/Berlin Also resolves to the appropriate url. Is that a redirect? What's the appropriate url? Is there content negotiation happening from http://wikidata.org/wiki/Q{id} Or just from http://wikidata.org/id/Q{id} What happens if I request http://wikidata.org/id/Q{id} And accept only html? Is there content negotiation from http://wikidata.org/data/Q{id} Or do I have to use parameters to get different representations? Is there a better picture Sorry to be thick Michael [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/URI_scheme#Machine-readable_a ccess On 06/07/2012 18:20, "Gregor Hagedorn" <g.m.hagedorn(a)gmail.com> wrote: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated. If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system. Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately. Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received. Further communication will signify your consent to this.