Wednesday, January 22, 2014

#Wikidata - it is all in the perspective

Many items in Wikidata do not have a label in English, I hope you will agree that it is more informative to show a label in any language than to show the internal Wikidata number. Q15634732 is a fine example; it is a year that is part of the Telugu calendar. The Telugu knows a cycle of sixty years and, this is one of them.

The year విరోధి is something that recurs and as a consequence, I was told it should be a "subclass of" a "year" and not an "instance of" a "year". When you check this item out, it is made obvious that it is part of the Telugu calendar.

This kind of specificity is needed for any year. Just stating 2014 for instance is not enough for Wikidata; multiple calendars know events that happened in a year that can be identified as "2014". The year 2014 in the Julian calendar for instance is 13 days off from the Gregorian or "common era" calendar.

I understand the use of "subclass off" in this instance but I fail to understand why 2014 and all the other instances do not have a qualification of the calendar they belong to.
Thanks,
      Gerard


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