Daniel Mayer wrote:
Disambiguation is aimed at resolving ambiguities and having both "film" and "movie" exist side by side is inconsistent - creating ambiguity.
I agree. Having a standard is more important than which particular standard.
Another aspect of this, apart from disambiguation, is that identifying all motion pictures as (film) or (movie), even when there is no ambiguity, is that this "meta-data" could be used later on to extract a portion of our data for a movie history project or similar.
One reason we've been successful is that we didn't get bogged down in a priori design before we just plunged in like maniacs and started writing an encyclopedia. But at the same time, looking forward, we will likely someday want to come up with ways for people to usefully (and SIMPLY!!!!) put some structure on the data.
It'd be nice to be able to do a query and pull out all biographies, for example, or all countries, or all movies, or all dog breeds. Not so nice that we should get all bogged down in debates about the perfect system, but nice enough that we should think about how conventions can help us move in that direction gracefully.
--Jimbo