Topic on User talk:Hearvox

Greetings, you appear to be adding Internet domain names as "English aliases" to various items. Can you please explain the rationale for this? It is not a common nor accepted practice. Please review your edits before we need to revert them for you, en masse.

I'm adding domain names to news-media as an alias. The domain of a newspaper is often synonymous with its name, and the URL is often the source of the article for a reader: "I read it in BostonGlobe.com" is the same as "I read it in the Boston Globe." Also, adding the domain as an alias makes the domain name searchable, which it wouldn't be otherwise. That is, a Wikidata search for "nytimes.com" only finds The New York Times if the domain was an alias. See demo of this: https://misinfocon.com/turning-wikimedia-into-a-news-site-credibility-tool-422dbf28fdec

Well you're doing far more than that. You're adding it to human beings and other entities as well. There is a space for official website for every item we have; there is no need to clutter the "aliases" fields with these entries.

I should add many newspapers in Wikidata already have their domain name as an alias. I'm just making most news-media consistent with this practive, so both humans and machines can easily find a newspaper in WD by it's domain.

Additionally, domain names are (close to) unique, unlike the newspaper name itself (i.e., there are many named "Daily Times"). So its domain name connects a newspaper with their entries in external databases, thereby allowing us to import critical data into Wikidata: data related to source-reliability that Wikipedia now lacks (membership in a press association, for instance).