On 04/04/12 23:23, Gregor Hagedorn wrote:
Wikidata can (and probably will) store information about each moon of Uranus, e.g., its mass. It does probably not make sense to store the mass of "Moons of Uranus" if there is such an article. It does not help to know that the article "Moons on Uranus" also talks (among other things) about some moon that has a particular mass: you need to know what *exactly* you are talking about to exploit this data. An article on "Moons of Uranus" could still (eventually) embed Wikidata data to improve its display, but this data must refer to individual moons, not to the article as a whole.
The problem I see is that you have no definition to which real object the data are tied. We agree that the problem is not the interwiki links per se. It is what results from it. How do we tie data to a wikidata page when we don't know what it is about?
This is a hard question. The best answer I can come up with now (on the bus to Oxford) is as follows: the meaning of Wikidata items is subject to social agreement, based on shared experience, communication, and human-language documentation. The latter is provided in labels and descriptions, in Wikipedia articles that are connected to a Wikidata item, and also in Wikidata property pages that document properties.
I know that this may not be a satisfactory answer to your question of how we can *really* *know* what a Wikidata item is about. If you want to dig deeper into this issue, there is a lot of interesting literature, which can give you many more details than I can. What we are dealing with is the well-known philosophical problem of /grounding/. In essence, the state of discussion boils down to the following: there is no known way of connecting the symbols of a purely symbolic system (such as a computer program) to real-world objects in a formal way. Going deeper into the discussion reveals that there is also no agreed-upon way to clarify the meaning of "real" and "object" in the first place.
In spite of all this, humans somehow manage to understand each other, which brings us to the point of how amazing they all are :-) Wikidata is but a humble technical tool that provides an environment for articulating and (I hope) improving this understanding in a novel way. This cannot provide a formal grounding, but it might come as close to this ideal as we have gotten yet.
Regards,
Markus