Am 05.02.2016 um 10:56 schrieb Markus Kroetzsch:
On 04.02.2016 18:59, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Am 04.02.2016 um 08:03 schrieb Markus Krötzsch:
Data model updates are costly. Don't make them on a week's notice, without prior discussion, and without having any documentation ready to give to data users. It would also be good to announce breaking technical changes more prominently on wikidata-tech as well.
These have been discussed for months, if not years. Especially identifiers.
Citation needed ;-) Note that my emails were about math, not about the identifiers.
The ticket exists since May 2014 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T67397. I didn't follow discussions on the wiki, but it has been up on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Development_plan since August 2015.
Also, discussing about something is not enough. In the end, you need to give us the technical details so we can fix our tools. I knew that you planned to introduce identifier types, but I still don't know the RDF IRI for this new type.
I send the technical info in a separate mail. You are right that we should do that kind of thing a bit earlier.
No, sorry, this is just wrong. The datatypes are part of the model, not of the data. Changing the format of JSON to include new, hitherto unknown types might break a tool (and not break others). It will depend on the function of the tool (and its implementation technique) but some will break.
I think there is a fundamental difference in the perception of format specifications here. For software that consumes "mix and match" formats like JSON and XML, I expect them to be written in a forward compatible way: unknown things just get ignored.
I have written about this in a separate mail to wikidata-tech.