Hi, Olivier,

Wikidata already has millions of items about publications which aren't used as a reference for any other item but can be useful to a certain extent; in fact, services like inventaire.io are based on those items. Using them to reference statements is a good practice.

Referencing statements by using only ISBNs isn't convenient. Among other problems, that prevents both humans and automated algorithms from easily generating complete citations like those you can find on Wikipedia. At the same time, every set of several pairs property-value describing something relevant and different from the referent of the item of which they are part should be moved to their own item, the item about the referent they actually describe.

Regards,

El 24/08/18 a las 14:11, Olivier van D'Huynslager escribió:

Dear whomever this concerns,

I was trying to use an ISBN code to reference and source a statement. However, Wikidata does not approve using ISBN as a reference value and demands to create a record of the source material in which one can use the ISBN code as an identifier. I understand that at this point it makes no sense when translated to triples to use the property ISBN as a referencer but was wondering if there shouldn’t be a property “ISBN for source material”? This would make referencing a lot easier and might prevent the cluttering of Wikidata with millions of publications (not even speaking of translated and editions…).

Kind regards, Olivier