Talk:Q131512

This item seems to have been split into farmer (Q131512) and farmer (Q56023946). I don't understand what this means - in English, "agriculturer" is just a rare word for "farmer" and doesn't have a special meaning (I've never seen it outside a dictionary). No Wikipedia has an article on the two different concepts, so there's no easy way to see the difference in any given language.

My best guess from looking at the descriptions in various languages is that farmer (Q131512) is someone who does any kind of agriculture, while farmer (Q56023946) is specifically someone who does agriculture on a farm - is that correct? If so, we should probably move all the occupation (P106):farmer (Q131512) entries to be occupation (P106):farmer (Q56023946), as these will overwhelmingly be farmers. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:16, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

I still haven't figured out the difference here, but as this item is overwhelmingly used for "farmer", I've switched that to be the primary label. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:07, 29 January 2019 (UTC)

@Blackcat: - I see you've changed this to "agriculturalist". I still am not sure what the distinction is meant to be - could you explain what the meaning you're trying to convey here is? It feels a lot like this and farmer (Q12323650) are two basically similar items - the only language that has items for both is Danish. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:55, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Hello @Andrew Gray:, I was thinking to someone who is involved into science and technics of agriculture rather than farming. -- Blackcat (talk) 16:21, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

@Blackcat: Thanks - so maybe something similar to agronomist (Q28054752) or agricultural engineer (Q18926350) (or perhaps even agronomist (Q1781198)) would work for that meaning?

I'm a bit worried about this being a big change in the meaning of the item. It was originally created as "farmer", and remained "farmer" until August 2018, when it was changed it to "agriculturer" (old version, new version) and farmer (Q56023946) was created. I don't know quite what the reason behind that split was (see my comments above) but I think this was a very bad idea.

There are about 16,000 statements linking to Q131512, only a few hundred linking to Q12323650, and it seems likely that almost all of the Q131512 ones were used to mean the old meaning of the item.

I would suggest we change it back, merge farmer (Q56023946)/farmer (Q12323650) into this item, and create a new one to reflect the new sense, rather than trying to do it the other way around. This will mean all the old statements are pointing to the correct value rather than a new one. Thoughts? Also @Herrinsa:, who did the original split. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:01, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

PS: have left a note about this on project chat to see if some more people can take a look, as I'm getting quite confused by it! All very complicated :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:08, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

@Andrew Gray: Yes , of course anything useful to reduce the confusion is welcome, I am sorry if I contributed to create any mess, I thought I was helping to rationalize the items... -- Blackcat (talk) 21:35, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

• Following on from the discussion at Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2019/05#Farmers_and_agriculturers?, I've merged the two pages back together, and split out the one duplicate sitelink into bonde (Q64763429) (there are a lot of other items like this where one local concept has a single item - they're all marked as subclasses). I've also cleaned up the subclass tree, which is now all described here. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:09, 21 June 2019 (UTC)