number on metal or plastic plate attached to a motor vehicle or trailer. Use qualifier applies to jurisdiction (P1001) to described the country issuing the plate. If registration is done by state, use the state as value.
I agree that a qualifier should generally be there, but I think Illinois (Q1204) would be better as value than Illinois Department of Transportation (Q4925114) (assuming there is only authority per area). For most European countries, we would use the item of the country rather than of a local authority issuing the plate. This lead me to suggest P1001. --- Jura11:44, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support but I don't think that applies to jurisdiction (P1001) is the right qualifier, as a vehicle registration issued in e.g. Illinois is valid wherever the vehicle happens to be, whereas issued by (P2378) (whichever value it holds) indicates that the registration number is part of whichever schema. As for the issuing authority, in Great Britain registrations were initially issued by local authorities, then from October 1974 by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (Q5308010) (initially through regional offices, but latterly centrally). In Northern Ireland registrations were also done by local authorities initially, then from 1974 by local offices (of something, the en.wp article isn't clear), from 2007 to 2014 by Driver & Vehicle Agency (Q5307988) and since then by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (Q5308010) but still to a separate scheme. Worldwide, some countries issue registrations nationally, others regionally; regional schemes may or may not be unique nationally (e.g. region A and region B may plates with identical numbers in some countries I think). Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 13:24, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The qualifier is a bit tricky, to be sure. In Germany, plates are issued by a county authority. For example the first plate is issued by the "Schwalm-Eder-Kreis" as can be seen by the seal and the first two letters, while the second plate is issued by the city of Berlin (seal and first letter). So, local authorities issue the plates, but they are part of a national system. --Srittau (talk) 13:51, 6 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Neither qualifier seems ideal. "Issued by" currently requires an organization as value. Maybe we should do a new property as qualifier. --- Jura17:42, 7 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Why do you say that? Although the proposal is labelled "car registration plate" the domain indicates that what is meant is "road vehicle registration plate", and "FA15" is a valid registration issued by Burton upon Trent (Q1000597) in the Great Britain series and by others in other series. Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt)
I don't care so much about which qualifier is actually being used, but I don't see the point in specifying which office in Schwalm-Eder-Kreis is issuing the German plate. Using "Germany" as value for the qualifier should be sufficient. If there is actually a point in inventorying these offices, I don't see the advantage of doing it as a qualifier on license plate. Worse, people might omit the qualifier, because they have no way of finding that. --- Jura21:46, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral I don't see much of a use for this property. The example used a fictional vehicle, but other than those, where do we find items for individual vehicles where adding the license plate number is necessary? I do know the following this about this property should it be created:
License plate number and fleet number are not equivalent. The former is issued by the government, while the latter is issued by the vehicle's operator.
We do need a mandatory qualifier representing the issuer, since the number by itself has no context. But instead of debating between jurisdiction and agency, can we make use of the existing items for the Wikipedia articles on most jurisdiction's license plates, like vehicle registration plates of Germany (Q254262)?
I doubt the databases of license plate numbers (vehicle registry is the UK term, I believe.) are even public. The value of the property needs to be a string.
Oppose as proposed. If it's a sub property of fleet or registration number (P2802) which has string type, this must also have string type. Also, I am firmly convinced that external id's should avoid requiring any qualifiers, and definitely any property with a mandatory qualifier should not be an external id as currently defined (it precludes any sort of direct linking or lookup just by the id value). Also "car" is ill-defined - is this to include SUV's, small trucks? Also I have some doubts about the need - if we don't anticipate more than a few hundred distinct vehicles with items in wikidata that this could apply to, why not just use fleet or registration number (P2802)? ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:08, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@ArthurPSmith, Happy5214: re the need, it will certainly be very useful if we ever start storing structured data about Commons images (I'm not at all sure what the plans are in this regard) as the registration number appears to be extensively used to categorise images of specific historic vehicles, particularly buses (e.g. commons:Category:Preserved bus in the UK (CDL 899)), and individual road vehicles can be noteworthy (although I can't think of any non-fictional ones off the top of my head that have an en.wp article - road vehicles aren't my area of expertise!). Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 21:45, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Comment car license plates are fairly well defined in most countries. I don't see why people don't just added a "en-gb" label. --- Jura21:58, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Because (1) languages countries do not have a 1:1 correspondence and (2) not all registration systems are done nationally (e.g. in the US it's done at a sate level, so in theory there could be 50 different vehicles with the same number). Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 22:33, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, let's keep the terminology simple. The qualifier would definitely indicate the state for US ones. Given some of the comments above, it occurs that some people might work better with a more vaguely defined property, such as fleet or registration number (P2802). Maybe we should just remain with that and see how messy it gets. --- Jura02:35, 7 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think car license plates are not IDs, in general - there can be a few special cases where extremely notable plate is bound to specific car, but most commonly they are not. Also, type of external ID strongly implies existance of the external database to which this one refers to, ideally automatically reachable via following properties/URL formats, etc. This is not the case. Would support it if it were a string (though it intersects with fleet or registration number (P2802) but it's no big deal IMHO) but Oppose as external ID. – The preceding unsigned comment was added byLaboramus (talk • contribs).
Comment Sub-property of fleet or registration number (P2802) 
Support, I think we should add issued by (P2378) as mandatory qualifier, though. --Srittau (talk) 11:37, 6 May 2016 (UTC)
Oppose for datatype external-id. Maybe support for datatyp string. --Pasleim (talk) 21:05, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
Neutral I don't see much of a use for this property. The example used a fictional vehicle, but other than those, where do we find items for individual vehicles where adding the license plate number is necessary? I do know the following this about this property should it be created:
.jpg)
Not done, clearly no consensus for an external-id property. I think there could be consensus for a string-based property, though. --Srittau (talk) 18:22, 7 August 2016 (UTC)