On 5 April 2012 18:30, Denny Vrandečić denny.vrandecic@wikimedia.de wrote:
The label and the description together are meant to be identifying.
I.e. "Georgia - A country in central Asia", or "Frankfurt - A city in Hesse, Germany", etc.
Additionally, the Wikipedia links provide quite some guidance to it.
I believe it will be difficult to craft labels that work as definitions. A label is hinting, and may often be sufficiently precise for the majority of purposes. If we speak of "Germany" it is very hard to express in a simple string the different historical, geographical, political delimitations that this term may carry.
In my own field of work even technical terms are often difficult to resolve to a definition. In biology, the width of taxon delimitations changes over time and with new research, and even technical terms in morphologoy often have quite different meanings, depending on the "school" that is being followed.
Or to cite a car example again: The label "Renault Kangoo" is unspecific as to the version/revision/release of it, so technical data that vary between these versions can not be added to it. However, the de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Kubistar is in most Wikipedias also subsumed under "Renault Kangoo". So it is a valid assumption that when labeling something "Renault Kangoo" it refers to both of these identical models sold under different names. But then, the "Nissan Kubistar" is only equivalent to the first version/revision/release of the "Renault Kangoo"...
This is not unsolvable, but if you want to import or add data to an element, it will be very hard to judge from a short label the correct concept. I was hoping that linking this to Wikipedia articles would help, but this will be hard if a Wikidata page is linked to 40 Wikipedias, any given Wikidata editor can read only a handful of, and with no support to distinguish between exactMatch and closeMatch.
My suggestions is to allow a differentiation of exactMatch and closeMatch and instruct editors to use at least one exact match, and considers this or these the defining wikipedia pages, whereas other are added as close match.
Of course, the label will remain useful to stumble of changes in definition of width of concept over time, and correct those after consulting the revision number to which the original links was formed (not present, but perhaps achievable by some timestamping and comparison?)
Gregor