I agree with all four of those points. As your question, we do not have that type of property yet, and although it might be slightly controversial, I would certainly support it. We would however need monolingual text as a property type before that could happen. Personally I see supporting web addresses as being much more critical on the list of properties for development, is that would dramatically open up our ability to source data. That being said, I really haven't been keeping up with the development schedule, so I have no idea what's in the pileline and in what order.
S On Sep 7, 2013 1:44 PM, "Magnus Manske" magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
All valid points, Sven. I would just like to say that
- this is not intended as a replacement or auto-fill for descriptions; it
is to be shown if the manual description is blank (at least, that was my angle)
- unusual items, like your example, will likely have a manual desription;
the run-of-the-mill millitary person will not
- for many uses, even an imperfect or (through omission) somewhat
misleading description is better than none
- as in your example, a misrepresentation is first and foremost due to the
incompleteness of Wikidata and the properties it offers
The last one reminds me: is there a "reason for notability" property? In your example item, the Ft. Hood shootings could be added that way, and then also show up in the description ("notable for Ft. Hood shooting").
On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 6:32 PM, Sven Manguard svenmanguard@gmail.comwrote:
This has the potential to work, but we need to be careful that the descriptions don't only partially represent their subjects. This is especially difficult with humans, as they are often known for several things, and occasionally (but in a statistically significant number, I would think), known for things that don't fit cleanly into a "[nationality] [career], born [birth year]" formula. As it exists now, the Wikidata item on the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan [1], gives his military branch and rank, his location and place of birth, his gender, and a Commons category. From that, a bot summary would likely be "American Army major, born 1970". There would be no indication of his source of notability, the shooting.
What I would recommend is that we start with inanimate objects and get our bearings on bot-generated descriptions there (celestial objects, video games, buildings), then move onto the slightly more complicated to define non-human living things (species of plant, species of animal, species of creepy-crawly) and geographic locations (rivers, villages/towns/cities, mountain ranges), and then finally onto humans.
Some things to think about: How do you create a description for a battleship that saw service with several different navies or a river that runs through several different countries? How do you create a description for a country that does not exist anymore or a location that has been destroyed? How do you create a description for a fictional person, item, place, etc., when Wikidata does not currently have an effective way of denoting that something is fictional? It might make sense to use Wikipedia categories to augment the Wikidata statements.
I think that we should build a few formulas that are... difficult to screw up. Video games come to mind, because the formula "[year of first publication] [genre] video game" is really all you need, and other than that some games have multiple genres, there's no way to get the description wrong. Once the people with coding knowledge figure out what they want to do implementation wise, I'll be happy to work with the formulas.
[1] http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1400551#sitelinks-wikipedia
On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 7:12 AM, Luca Martinelli <martinelliluca@gmail.com
wrote:
2013/9/7 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
I believe that, for items that have basic claims/statements, short descriptions can be generated automatically, for supported languages.
If we
have "person", "Belgian", "painter", and birth/death year, a sentence
like
"Belgian painter (1900-2000)" can be constructed. Some awards (Nobel
prize,
Victoria cross, etc.) could be added.
+1 on the idea. Not sure about the birth/death year, though.
-- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita
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