I would say that GND is a “good enough” answer.
Most named entities are persons, organizations, events, creative works and
places and these are all mutually exclusive. There ought to be a system
interlock to prevent confusion between them.
“Organism Classification” or whatever you call it should also be on the
list, because of prevalence.
One thing I’d add to that is fictional character because there are a (1)
lot of them and (2) they can be ontologized more-or-less in parallel with
people, and (3) you’ll get cleaner people if you keep fictional characters
out. (On the other hand, there are fictional events, places, etc. too,
though these are not so well documented.) Is it easy to add a new GND type?
I think you’re calling the “wastebin” category term, which is reasonable
(I’d call it a “concept”.) Going much further than this you’ll run into Borges
encyclopedia style risks, but aren’t the categories named in GND upwards of
80% of the topics? Can you run a report on this?
From: Sven Manguard
Sent: Sunday, June 30, 2013 2:19 PM
To: Discussion list for the Wikidata project.
Subject: [Wikidata-l] A solution with finality is needed for P107 - maintype
(GND)
I have just closed a second deletion discussion for Property:P107 - main type
(GND).
As with the first discussion, it is clear that there is a broad sense that main
type (GND) is not an ideal solution, however as it stands now, a large enough
portion of the community does not want to get rid of it unless/until a
replacement system is found or developed. For this reason, I closed the
discussion as no consensus and opened up a request for comment on the matter of
finding a replacement for P107.
I have gone to the unusual step of emailing the mailing list for three reasons.
First, P107 is the most used property on the project, and it or its replacement
will (most likely) remain the most used property on the project forever.
Second, the GND has evolved into a component of how Wikidata is structured; our
lists of properties are sorted by GND type, and that has a real impact on what
properties are used on what pages. The third reason is that, as a general
statement, participation levels in requests for comment have been downright
sad. Three or four people participating in an RfC is, for a project of this
size, unhealthy, and most RfCs don't get more than that many people
participating in them. For something this important, we need at least a dozen
people, preferably at least twice that.</rant>
Anyways, the RfC is at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Primary_sorting_property
and I hope that, with broad participation, we can finally resolve this issue.
Yours,
Sven
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