On 14 June 2016 at 18:53, Tom Morris tfmorris@gmail.com wrote:
A specific instance of the structural impedance mismatch is enwiki's handling of genes & proteins. Sometimes they have a page for each, but often they have a single page that deals with both or, worse, a page who's text says its about the protein, but where the page includes a gene infobox.
This is also a problem with pages on elections. It's very common for national-level elections to be for more than one thing at the same time — e.g. a Presidential election, and a Parliamentary one. In most Wikipedias there will only be a single page for, say, "Brazilian general election, 2014", though occasionally you'll get separate pages in _some_ languages for (for example) "Brazilian legislative election, 2010" and "Brazilian presidential election, 2010" (also split in pt:), whereas those will be combined in other languages (de:Wahlen in Brasilien 2010 / pl:Wybory powszechne w Brazylii w 2010 roku).
Mostly this material hasn't had a lot of attention yet on Wikidata, so it's not _too_ hard to split out separate pages for each conceptually different thing and each of which is 'part of' a wider 'general election' (though for an added twist, the legislative elections are often themselves for multiple houses (eg the Assembly and Senate) simultaneously, and almost never have distinct Wikipedia pages).
I have seen at least one case though where someone then merged two of these, presumably (although I didn't dig into deeply enough to be sure) because each of the Wikidata pages mapped to a single page in "their" Wikipedia. Thankfully this doesn't appear to have been too common an occurrence yet, but that's potentially just because very few of them have even been split up in the first place yet. (Currently I'm largely just picking off the lower hanging fruit of just making sure that each of the national elections in the world over last hundred years or so even has a basic Wikidata entry *at all*.) I'm hoping that such merges would be less likely in cases where each of the individual Wikidata pages had quite rich information on candidates, turnout, winners, etc, but as it's comparatively difficult to even semi-automate the import of statements like that (and many of the existing pages already have confusing combined data presumably from Wikipedia infobox imports from such mismatched pages), it's likely that it'll take quite a while for that to happen, and I fear that there will thus be quite a long period where it will be tempting for people to mis-merge pages.
Tony