mkroetzsch added a comment. I really wonder if the introduction of all kinds of specific markup languages in Wikidata is the right way to go. We could just have a Wikitext datatype, since it seems that Wikitext became the gold standard for all these special data types recently. Mark-up over semantics. By this I mean that the choice of format is focussed on presentation, not on data exchange. I am not an expert in chemical modelling (but then again, is anyone in this thread?), but it seems that this mark-up centric approach is fairly insufficient and naive.
I am also missing the requirements analysis. How many infoboxes are currently using any chemical formula with this special markup at all? If you look at a page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol, you see there is no such markup in the whole page. Neither is there in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis. Who really needs this in Wikidata? Aren't there many other forms of notation in chemistry (and biology) that would be equally important? There are some really fundamental datatypes currently missing, notably multi-lingual texts and geo shapes. This is the level on which datatypes are useful. Presentational things can be done by gadgets, as we already have for URL links shown with IDs. There is no need to codify this in the data model. Communities can solve these simple problems already without changing datatypes of existing properties (which is costly since existing applications and tools need to be updated each time). It is also notable that https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P274 has better format documentation than what is proposed here (at least there is no documentation of what the proposed format actually consists in in this thread). They even define a regular language for the possible content. Their direct, text-based formatting is preferable in many cases. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T126862 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: mkroetzsch Cc: mkroetzsch, Chemical-Markup, gerritbot, daniel, Lydia_Pintscher, Aklapper, Physikerwelt, Izno, Wikidata-bugs, Prod, aude, fredw, Pkra, scfc, Mbch331, Ltrlg _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
