Use the same properties for family relationships of animals and humans
Sex /gender is the only property that has values for female / male
creatures different from the values for male / female humans.
Joe
On Wed, 26 Aug 2015 12:45 Ole Palnatoke Andersen <palnatoke(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I've just completed #100wikidays, and my 100th
article was about a
horse:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12003911 That horse is the
grandfather of
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20872428, but should I
use the same properties as for humans?
We also have
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12331109 and
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q12338810, who were father and son.
Again: Do we have animal properties, or do we use the same as for
humans?
Regards,
Ole
On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk>
wrote:
Having gone and written the RFC
(
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Merging_relatio…
)
I've just discovered that we *did* have this
discussion in 2013:
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata%3AProperties_for_deleti…
- and it was suggested we come back to it "after Phase III". I think
the existing state of arbitrary access should be able to solve this
problem, so I've added some notes about this.
Comments welcome; I'll circulate notifications onwiki tonight.
Andrew.
On 24 August 2015 at 14:02, Lukas Benedix <benedix(a)zedat.fu-berlin.de>
wrote:
> +1 for genderless family relationship
properties.
>
> Lukas
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Thanks again for your comments. It looks like:
>>
>> a) there's interest in simplifying this;
>>
>> b) creating automatic inferences is possibly desirable but will need a
>> lot of work and thought.
>>
>> I'll put together an RFC onwiki about merging the "gendered"
>> relationship properties, which will address the first part of the
>> issue, and we can continue to think about how best to approach the
>> second.
>>
>> Andrew.
>>
>> On 17 August 2015 at 12:29, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've recently been thinking about how we handle family/genealogical
> relationships in Wikidata - this is, potentially, a really valuable
> source of information for researchers to have available in a
> structured form, especially now we're bringing together so many
> biographical databases.
>
> We currently have the following properties to link people together:
>
> * spouses (P26) and cohabitants (P451) - not gendered
> * parents (P22/P25) and step-parents (P43/P44) - gendered
> * siblings (P7/P9) - gendered
> * children (P40) - not gendered (and oddly no step-children?)
> * a generic "related to" (P1038) for more distant relationships
>
> There's two big things that jump out here.
>
> ** First, gender. Parents are split by gender while children are not
> (we have mother/father not son/daughter). Siblings are likewise
> gendered, and spouses are not. These are all very early properties -
> does anyone remember how we got this way?
>
> This makes for some odd results. For example, if we want to using our
> data to identify all the male-line *descendants* of a person, we have
> to do some complicated inference from [P40 + target is male]. However,
> to identify all the male-line *ancestors*, we can just run back up the
> P22 chain. It feels quite strange to have this difference, and I
> wonder if we should standardise one way or the other - split P40 or
> merge the others.
>
> In some ways, merging seems more elegant. We do have fairly good
> gender metadata (and getting better all the time!), so we can still do
> gender-specific relationship searches where needed. It also avoids
> having to force a binary gender approach - we are in the odd position
> of being able to give a nuanced entry in P21 but can only say if
> someone is a "sister" or "brother".
>
> ** Secondly, symmetry. Siblings, spouses, and parent-child pairs are
> by definition symmetric. If A has P26:B, then B should also have
> P26:A. The gendered cases are a little more complicated, as if A has
> P40:B, then B has P22:A or P25:A, but there is still a degree of
> symmetry - one of those must be true.
>
> However, Wikidata doesn't really help us make use of this symmetry. If
> I list A as spouse of B, I need to add (separately) that B is spouse
> of A. If they have four children C, D, E, and F, this gets very
> complicated - we have six articles with *30* links between them, all
> of which need to be made manually. It feels like automatically making
> symmetric links for these properties would save a lot of work, and
> produce a much more reliable dataset.
>
> I believe we decided early on not to do symmetric links because it
> would swamp commonly linked articles (imagine what Q5 would look like
> by now!). On the other hand, these are properties with a very narrowly
> defined scope, and we actively *want* them to be comprehensively
> symmetric - every parent article should list all their children on
> Wikidata, and every child article should list their parent and all
> their siblings.
>
> Perhaps it's worth reconsidering whether to allow symmetry for a
> specifically defined class of properties - would an automatically
> symmetric P26 really swamp the system? It would be great if the system
> could match up relationships and fill in missing parent/child,
> sibling, and spouse links. I can't be the only one who regularly adds
> one half of the relationship and forgets to include the other!
>
> A bot looking at all of these and filling in the gaps might be a
> useful approach... but it would break down if someone tries to remove
> one of the symmetric entries without also removing the other, as the
> bot would probably (eventually) fill it back in. Ultimately, an
> automatic symmetry would seem best.
>
> Thoughts on either of these? If there is interest I will write up a
> formal proposal on-wiki.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
> andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
--
http://palnatoke.org * @palnatoke * +4522934588
_______________________________________________
Wikidata mailing list
Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata