Wikidata:Requests for comment/A meta item namespace (Mxxx) for structured data about Wikidata

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

stale --Emu (talk) 12:12, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An editor has requested the community to provide input on "A meta item namespace (Mxxx) for structured data about Wikidata" via the Requests for comment (RFC) process. This is the discussion page regarding the issue.

If you have an opinion regarding this issue, feel free to comment below. Thank you!


THIS RFC IS CLOSED. Please do NOT vote nor add comments.

Proposal[edit]

At the moment there is no good way to save and query structured information about bots. Some queries that may be useful:

  • Which bots use what sources. e.g. which bots are scraping dblp computer science bibliography (Q1224715)
  • Which bots use what properties. e.g. what bots are setting DOI (P356)
  • Which bots create which kind of items. e.g. which bots creates items with instance of (P31)ITU-T recommendation version (Q55936923)

An ideal solution to this problem with be to have bot items, bot owner items and bot task items. Other information such as git repository for the bot can then also be placed on the bot items.

One issue with putting this in the main namespace (Q###) is that it really is not of much relevance outside of Wikidata - and it will just result in noise if it goes into the main namespace. If we have a meta namespace it would be an ideal place to put such data.

Other items which may make more sense in a meta namespace are wiki disambiguation, wiki category and WikiProject items.

WikiProject Ontology has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.

Notified participants of WikiProject Categories

Amendments:

  1. This namespace would also be useful for other structured metadata, such as: User items (would be needed for bots items to refer to), WikiProject memebership, language knowledge, programming and tool knowledge.


Iwan.Aucamp (talk) 11:30, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

  • @Iwan.Aucamp: very interesting I did webscraping of Europeana Europeana entity (P7704) and we now see that we need better way to interact. Last week we had some emails back and forth and they plan a sprint how to work together with Wikidata see T251225#6105481 I hope we maybe could use Wikibase and also start finding possibilities to tell a data sources interested in working tight together with Wikidata that this is the way we "prefer" or at least that we can show them good patterns for doing dataroundtrips - Salgo60 (talk) 17:01, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The idea of a structured data namespace for user accounts is not new. There is for instance phab:T173145 (“Should global users have structured data on Meta?”), and IIRC the idea has also been discussed in the context of the Structured Data at Commons (SDC) project. Effectively such a namespace would be open for all users (not just bots), and particularly due to the spectrum of edit patterns at Wikidata from manual, assisted manual, tool batches to bots it would not work if limited to bots.
    Another aspect to consider is that Mxxx entities would potentially be confused with the MediaInfo entities at Commons which also use the M prefix. The phab ticket proposes U entities (for “user”). —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:55, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @MisterSynergy: This is interesting and I guess would be ideal for what I'm looking for. I guess one hangup I would have here is that the namespace is called user, but as long as it is open to all kinds of metadata it would be fine. Iwan.Aucamp (talk) 11:14, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Iwan.Aucamp: I don't think it would be easy for the developers to create another namespace like that. Would it work exactly like the "Q" namespace except that item-valued properties could be Q-items or M-items? Some of the items would be the same as regular Q items (QuickStatements (Q20084080) exists for instance). If it's really felt these shouldn't all be put into our regular item namespace, then how about creating a separate wikibase instance just for this purpose? ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:02, 4 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • @ArthurPSmith: A separate wikibase would be fine also, but I don't want to run it and I want it to be rather official so that we can as a community insist that bots are registered there. I would say behaviourally it should really be no different M-items should be no different from Q-items, maybe Q-items should not be allowed to refer to M-items in all circumstances - but the main idea is to make it clear to users of Wikidata that this data is not universal but scoped to Wikidata or Wikimedia. I think the proposal that MisterSynergy is possibly a better umbrella to do this under and I will look more into it. Iwan.Aucamp (talk) 11:14, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • The title of this RFC does not make clear the focus is bots. Seems like more thought needs to go into this proposal or how it is being packaged. Mkbergman (talk)
    • @Mkbergman: Bots is one justification for a structured metadata store, but it is not all this proposal is about. This would be useful for information about users themselves also. Other uses that would be good: User items with language info, WikiProject memberships, conflicts of interests. This information could then be used to determine interests or potential collaborators easier. I have updated the proposal to indicate that this is intended. Iwan.Aucamp (talk) 11:14, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have imagined that we should have local metadata for each local pages, so that article assessment templates and w:Template:Article history etc. may be stored in a queryable way.--GZWDer (talk) 11:54, 9 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not sure I'm interpreting GZWDer's comment correctly, but if I am, I think they idea would be to allow adding statements to User: space pages - we already have a User namespace that includes every user and bot. People can add their own metadata to their pages via templates and categories, but that doesn't allow SPARQL querying, so maybe we should allow (some?) additional metadata via Wikidata properties? I'm not sure this would be any more work for our developers than adding a whole new namespace, maybe less? ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:42, 11 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Namespaces in a triple store? Why? There is no namespace for human-items, nor for places, cars, machines, why one for bots? Keep it simple, put all bots into the Q-space. No relevance outside Wikidata a reason against using Q? There is a lot of Q-content with limited relevance, some hundreds bots wouldn't matter. MrProperLawAndOrder (talk) 15:05, 12 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Info I propose to close this RfC as stale after 31 January 2024. Please comment if you don’t agree. --Emu (talk) 20:23, 13 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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