Topic on User talk:Magnus Manske

Hey Magnus

I have recent seen that User:Reinheitsgebot adds a lot of references of database type (according to Help:Sources#Databases) to existing claims. Very useful in general, however I am wondering why it uses named as (P1810) instead of title (P1476) to indicate the database entry title. The latter is suggested by the (somewhat official) help page, and users will likely look for it if they want to use the reference—but they will probably not look for the former.

“named as” is also defined as “qualifier only”, but this is not qualifier use.

I have taken notice of Property talk:P1810#Usable on database identifiers ? (@Jheald), but I cannot see that there was concensus to change this.

I remember there was a discussion about it, which resulted in me switching to named as (P1810), but I can't find it right now. Come to think of it, stated as (P1932) says "use as qualifier to indicate how the value was spelled or printed in the source", which seems even better suited. I don't really have a favourite here... What say you?

for bibliographic records, I would much prefer P1932, thank you... :))

P1932 is a qualifier to indicate how the relationship or the value in the statement was originally stated.

P1810 should be used to indicate how the subject of the statement was originally stated.

This is the difference between the two. Some statements (eg film credits) can have both.

… and I can meanwhile remember why the title (P1476) property was probably chosen to be used in those references:

In most cases, Wikidata items and external database entries are mapped on a 1:1 basis. With that approach, one could simply use the label as a title of the reference link if used in Wikipedias, and omit any title qualifiers in the reference. The exact spelling of the database entry title does not really hold much information beyond the Wikidata item label.

However, there is no requirement for a 1:1 mapping, and database entries can for instance contain information about the Wikidata item, although being about a different (yet related) concept. IIRC there was an example of chemical substances given in the past, which can be classified according to different rules in a way that multiple Wikidata items are described by the same external database entry.

Anyway, with that approach the string we discuss about tells us what the external database entry is actually about, which is another information that a plain Wikidata item label. P1810 and P1932 do not seem to be fully suitable in that case. However, I can’t tell how rare such cases are.

Actually I don’t really have a preference, and I am explicitly not really happy with title (P1476) anyway due to the monolingualtext data type. The database language should be defined in the corresponding database item and pulled from there.

However, what bothers me is the fact that this is a non-standard format at the moment, and Wikipedias will likely not be able to deal with it properly and thus fail to display a useful database entry title for references using named as (P1810). There are some modules out there which check Wikidata references, filter out things such as “imported from: some Wikipedia”, and then figure out how to display the reference based on source types defined on Help:Sources.

stated as (P1932) (with string data type) does indeed look good to me (also “best”? — not sure right now), but we should make sure

1. that there is consensus to list it instead of title (P1476) at Help:Sources#Databases,
2. that we have a repair job for the old references, and
3. that Wikipedias are informed by this significant change to update their modules.

Not sure what to do now, maybe start a discussion at Wikidata:Project chat or Help talk:Sources. Maybe Jheald, already pinged above, and all other interested users can also comment here.

Well, either way there will be a bot cleanup job (which I might eng up writing/running), so I'll just continue as it is now, and wait for consensus. Please keep me informed.

Continued here.