Help:Statement Manual of Style

This page is a manual of style for different groups of items. A person for example should ideally have a birthday, while a town should have a location.

This guideline is intended to be accessible to people with little experience.

Person

The most important statement to identify a person is:

• instance of (P31) = human (Q5)

Additional useful statements are:

• sex or gender (P21) = male (Q6581097) / female (Q6581072) / intersex (Q1097630)
• date of birth (P569) = Input the date mentioned in the source
• place of birth (P19) = Input the populated place mentioned in the source Stockholm (Q1754)

Identifiers are unique alphanumeric strings that can ensure that Wikidata does not hold duplicate records of the same person, or has merged two persons in one item. A common identifier for authors is the VIAF-Identifier. You can find it by searching the name on http://viaf.org/ - The person you are looking for should have the same birthday or bibliography as the item you are adding the identifier to. Duplicates will show up in the constraint violations that you can view at Property talk:P214.

• VIAF ID (P214) = String that you can copy from the VIAF-page

Taxon (animal, plant, ...)

Each taxon has three basic properties:

• taxon name (P225) = the scientific name, e.g., Homo sapiens
• taxon rank (P105) = one of the accepted ranks, e.g., species (Q7432)
• parent taxon (P171) = the item of the next higher clade, e.g., Homo (Q171283)

Several additional properties, e.g., for the taxon author and year of description can be found at the Wikidata:Taxonomy task force

Fossil

Fossil animals and plants require the usual taxonomic information. In addition they should receive two properties that describe in what geologic time span they are found:

• temporal range start (P523) = The first geologic age in which the fossil was found
• temporal range end (P524) = The last geologic age in which the fossil was found (If this is set, then the fossil is extinct)

Because the geologic time scale has been often revised in the 20th and 21st century, it is best to look up newer literature and use ages that are currently standardized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A list of these ages can be viewed in the constraint violations of Property talk:P523 or Geologic Time Scale.

Disease

The data model for diseases (e.g. dengue fever (Q30953)) is not fully finished yet. You may discuss ideas at Wikidata:WikiProject Medicine.

Diseases have many identifiers from different medical databases (See: dengue fever (Q30953)). Because diseases are hard to delimit there is always some duplication of identifiers. On Wikidata it would be ideal to keep different concepts apart: Meaning separate items for disease, symptom or the organism that causes the disease.

Try to add the following properties to a disease:

• subclass of (P279) = disease (Q12136) or any of the items linking to disease (Q12136)
• symptoms and signs (P780) = Any symptoms typically associated with the disease
• afflicts (P689) = Can be used for an organ, a tissue or the afflicted organism. Might cause ambiguity which should be discussed.
• has cause (P828) = Possible causes for the disease. Will require some kind of numeric qualifier in the future.

Microprocessor

Processor series get their own item, so different clock speeds (etc...) can be added to the them. They should get the following statement connecting them to their processor family:

• For Pentium D 945 (Q15217736)

• subclass of (P279) = Pentium D (Q749081)

General information about the processor includes:

• follows (P155) - previous processor series or family produced by that manufacturer
• followed by (P156) - next processor series or family produced by that manufacturer
• manufacturer (P176)