On 28 November 2015 at 19:17, Ed Erhart <the.ed17(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On the very specific point of knowledge and how
it's not always possible to
boil it down to a single quantifiable value, I couldn't agree more. Thank
you, Andreas, for the detailed anecdote displaying that problem, and I'll
be happy to provide more if needed.
Does Wikidata have a way of marking data entries as estimates, or at least
dates as circa (not just unknown)?
Yes
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1317 however a quick comparison
between the English Wikipedia and wikidata suggests it isn't used very much.
Of course there are a bunch of other issues. It gives dates for Egyptian
Pharaohs without saying what chronology it is using. It keeps claiming
dates are Gregorian without showing any conversion has actually taken place
(wikipedians tend to be pretty poor when it comes to such conversions since
they require a fair bit of background knowledge. For example depending on
the year and writer the year in England can start on the 1st of January,
25th March or the first day of advent).
Wikidata doesn't do very well on carbon dating either. If we look at Ötzi
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q171291
We again get dates with no indication of the calibration used. Really this
would be better handled using the uncalibrated C14 numbers (4550 ± 27BP
http://digitalcommons.library.arizona.edu/objectviewer?o=http%3A%2F%2Fradio…
) and then adding enough information for the correct calibration curve to
be selected (Northern hemisphere land based which at the moment probably
means INTCAL13)
--
geni