Thursday, February 28, 2013

Denny, I do not agree

#Wikidata is a wiki and consequently Caesar can have a capitol according to Denny's blogpost. While I applaud the sentiment, it is not really practical.

Denny is the big man for Wikidata and he is a human and, he can be both right and wrong. So let me suggest why I do not support him in this and, let me suggest a compromise.

The one thing that will help is when there are classes and when those classes have attributes. For instance; a country has a national anthem, a capitol, a currency, a head of state etcetera. When you state that Caesar is a country, it then follows that he has a capitol, a currency, a head of state.. For Wikipedia this is really powerful. When all the countries have been labelled as such, it is easy and obvious to fill in the missing values for use in an info-box. The most valuable part of it is, that these values can be translated for use in info-boxes in other languages. Yes, the values can have their own Wikipedia articles as well as a label to use in an info-box.

When a label is used in an info-box, in any language, these labels are obviously of higher value than the  labels that are not used. So Denny can have his way and as long as labels are values when they are used in a Wikipedia all the extra labels will not be very much in the way. Hard-drives are cheap. It is possible to have classes with associated labels. These classes can be a associated with a particular info-box.


This is what Julius Caesar looks like at OmegaWiki. As you can see it is linked to Wikidata, it is linked to Wikipedia and, it is linked to Commons. It would be so cool when we have the best of both worlds in a joined project.

Please Denny, lets cross the Rubicon.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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