Talk:Q12737077

occupation (Q10687729)

Merge? --Fractaler (talk) 18:13, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

 already done for years, afaik. Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 05:29, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

intentional human activity (Q451967) or human behavior (Q3769299)

Not sure what to pick in subclass of (P279)

Is it correct to say that every occupation is purposeful and motivated? Likely yes, but I'm not sure about counter-examples. d1g (talk) 07:02, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

Proposal: let's commit to an expanded concept of occupation, not only official occupation categories

This item draws from official government category systems for occupations. Those systems usually cover ways someone makes a living, and only in categories that are relatively large. So a major activity someone might be known for wouldn't be an occupation if it doesn't pay the individual or family in money or in kind (barter). In some cases these are examples: philanthropist, child care / nurturer, human rights advocate, rescuer, inventor, member of nobility. It has been observed that activities of women are less likely than activities of men to be classified as occupations, and especially in past centuries. (I can cite academic work on that if needed.)

Our goal here is not to criticize or advocate changes to the government systems but rather to decide what we want "occupation" to mean on Wikidata. The definition of this category seems to say it will be broader than the government classifications. That makes sense to me as we do want to be able to classify what people are notable for as their occupation, as much as possible. Let's discuss and agree on that here. It means that there is a mapping from occupation used officially to categories here, but a small fraction of the occupations here on Wikidata will not have an equivalent in some outside systems. -- econterms (talk) 15:28, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

The descriptions already state "any activity of a person (hobby, work, pastime, professional sport...)" and that's how I have used this field. - PKM (talk) 19:16, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Too broad concept?

perpetrator (Q18028810) has set instance of (P31) to occupation (Q12737077), but perpetrator (Q18028810) can hardly be a profession. The question is whether occupation (Q12737077) should be for professional activities or very broad activities. — Finn Årup Nielsen (fnielsen) (talk) 06:19, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

fix: changed P21->P31 Eternal question. Sometimes occupation (P106) is filled with hobbys. --Infovarius (talk) 19:28, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Agree with Fnielsen. The full list of instances of Q12737077 (query) makes no sense. It includes taxes, economic activities, etc. PAC2 (talk) 07:42, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

new label seems to be misleading

The label of this was changed on March 30, 2021 from "occupation" to "non-professional work activity". This now seems to imply that hobbies or other things with which someone is occupied are not eligible because the are not "work". I know that there has long be confusion about the difference between "profession" and "occupation", but this change does not seem to me to help. It's not clear what "non-professional" means here. For example, in libraries we have employees who are librarians with master's degrees (the profession degree for librarians), and then we have many employees who are library assistants or library specialists who work in the library in various positions but are not librarians and don't usually have library master's degrees. "Library assistant" is clearly an occupation that someone gets paid to do. Is it just as clearly a "non-professional work activity"? Are we trying to say now that this kind of job is "non-professional"? What about someone who does a lot of knitting for their own pleasure and to give away as gifts? Is this a "work activity"? Should we have a separate property for hobbies? What I guess I am asking about is the wisdom of the recent label change and the benefits of it. UWashPrincipalCataloger (talk) 23:09, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Agree this seems quite confusing - it's not clear to me what a "non-professional work activity" is meant to be (is it work activity that is not professional, or activity that is not professional work?) and it seems that most of the uses of this item don't fit either of these meanings very well. I think it'd be best to keep "occupation" and possibly create a new subclass item for this particular meaning. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:37, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Digging into it a bit more, it looks like Q10687729 (merged into this item in 2018) had the "non-professional work activity" alias, which is presumably where it came from. Hmm. I think probably still best to revert to primary label "occupation", as the item seems to be being used in quite a general way, but @Dcflyer, GorillaWarfare: (who originally came up with the alias / who changed it over here) if they have thoughts. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:44, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Gray: A little background behind why I made the change: I saw it being used at feminist with the title "occupation" and thought it was weird given that people generally aren't feminists by trade. When I went and looked at the item I saw that it had the alternate label "non-professional work activity" and was marked "different from" profession, so I took it to mean that this was meant to be used to represent activities that one engages in that are distinct from their career/paid work. I may have misunderstood, though. It does seem odd that the same term would be used to describe "feminist" and "library assistant", so maybe one is mislabeled? It certainly seems like this is used for a broad range of things—items that are marked as instances of this include things as broad-ranging as

• definitely not professional occupations ("orphan", "pedestrian")
• what I would consider to be professions ("architect", "construction foreman", "dentist")
• quite a few things that could be either a hobby or a profession ("gardener", "clarinetist")

GorillaWarfare (talk) 19:09, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

@GorillaWarfare: Thinking about this some more, I think the best answer is "feminist and orphan are probably miscategorised", but figuring out how to fix it is more challenging. I know this is a general issue with how occupation (P106) is used on items - it tends to get used as a bit of a catch-all regardless of whether something can reasonably be summarised as an "occupation" - and it feels likely we have the same thing here.

The hierarchy seems to suggest that this item is intended primarily for work-type occupations, with "profession" as a subclass - ie this sense includes both things that are professions and things that are not professions. I don't think we have an obvious item to describe either a) "a thing a person does that may or may not be their work" (it would presumably sit between this and human activity); or b) "a thing a person does that is specifically not their work" (this is I think the one you're trying to represent?). My best guess is that the old item that was merged in here (Q10687729) was trying to express that first broad sense a) - it used the description "any activity of a person".

So maybe what we need is new items to express those broader concepts, and then we can reassign some things away from this item (occupation) to them? It would still be challenging for some of them, though - "orphan" is a state of being not a thing you do, for example. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:51, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

That certainly sounds like a step in the right direction. GorillaWarfare (talk) 13:04, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Just a note, I think I created some items for professional / non professional sport practitionners back in the day, I would not be surprised if they’ve been merged over time. author  TomT0m / talk page 13:19, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Sorry I dropped the ball a bit on this one. The more I think about this the more confusing it all becomes - I am struggling a bit with how to define what the suggested superclasses would be here, and what we would assign to them; I think one problem is that many things either a) would fit under both "work-occupation" and "recreation-occupation"; or b) simply don't fit well into either, so this solution wouldn't really help. Hmm hmm. I've restored the "occupation" label for now and will think about this some more before trying to push out a new taxonomy. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Is economic activity (Q8187769) a subclass of occupation (Q12737077) ?

I've launched a new discussion on the talk page of economic activity (Q8187769). PAC2 (talk) 07:40, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Gendered labels in French for all items of class Q12737077 s

I look at gendered labels of class occupation (Q12737077) in this notebook https://observablehq.com/@pac02/les-libellés-francophones-genrés-dans-wikidata (in French). PAC2 (talk) 18:33, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

"Sorry, we couldn’t find that page." --Infovarius (talk) 22:15, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

occupation n'égale pas métier

Je n'aime pas l'étiquette "métier" pour cet élément. Une occupation est, selon moi, beaucoup plus large qu'un métier. Je crois qu'il faudrait remplacer par "occupation". Simon Villeneuve (talk) 16:24, 17 March 2022 (UTC)