Many thanks for this discussion and the clarifications. I believe I
understand much better. Below I summarize my understanding; much of it
matches the existing documentation, but if someone in the Wikidata team
finds the time to check whether the present documentation can be improved,
or whether it was just my personal misunderstanding, the summary below may
be helpful. In retrospect, I believe much of my misunderstanding is based
on the present focus on phase 1, interlanguage links.
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1. A Wikidata page is a primary object, a "Wikiconcept" at any desired
level of granularity. Except for redirects or disambiguations, each
Wikipedia page in the article namespace will initially at least have one
Wikidata concept (page), because all concepts defined in Wikipedia are
considered relevant to Wikidata. However, many more Wikidata concepts
(pages) need to be created beyond the Wikipedia concepts. The concept
granularity required for Wikidata is much finer than the typical
(aggregated) granularity used on Wikipedia.
2. One or several Wikipedia language version pages may be linked to this
Wikidata concept (Wikidata 1 to Wikipedia 0..n). Importantly (and something
that was either unclear or I overlooked it): ALL such Wikipedia language
version pages are considered to be completely and equally defining the
Wikidata concept (page).
3. The initial setup of Wikidata concepts and Wikipedia links will be from
the interlanguage links in the Wikipedias. However, these links are _not_
meant to represent interlanguage links per see with their need to express
both exact and close matches. The import of interlanguage links is rather
designed as a _seeding_ mechanism for Wikidata.
4. The cases where concepts are overlapping across languages (e.g.
different words for waterbodies classified by size), where data require
more precise concept definitions than textual descriptions, or plain
imprecise linking need to removed from wikidata by a to-be-founded editing
community.
Some conclusions from my point of view:
a) I find it unlikely that 2
"interlanguage-concept-relation-editing-communities" will be willing to
work in parallel. I believe the Wikidata project must find a point in time,
where the editing of interlanguage links is switched over to Wikidata.
Keeping it in parallel without an active community will create problems due
to concept drift in Wikipedia pages.
b) Early on in the project, after a testing period, but not after the
wikidata concepts start being linked to permanent data, provide the means
of editing the entirety of interlanguage links, including those expressing
a "closeMatch". This may need further analysis.
c) The Wikipedia page _version_, which is considered to be the defining
one, should be recorded as part of the wikidata model.
d) To consider: Perhaps avoid calling the Wikidata concept a "page" (even
if at some level it will be implemented partly through a mediawiki page).
Avoiding "page" and "page" may make it easier to see the independence
of
the wikidata concept.
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Gregor