Continuing with the discussion of last week about the nature of properties I follow with my personal crusade to foster a better understanding of Wikidata (which sometimes means asking difficult questions :)). This time I ask about items, or concepts for that matter.
To start with I cherry-pick a very insightful question posed by Markus last week, that unfortunately I left unanswered: "The main question is "Did the reference say that pianos are instruments?" but not "Did the reference say pianos are instruments because of the definition of 'piano'?" Therefore, we don't need to put this information in our labels." To my mind that is a problem that, as the chicken and the egg, can be settled with just a word: emergence. There is no such thing as a piano or a concept of a piano. But both of them, concept and object, co-evolved over time and now we recognize certain objects as "pianos". Timeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano#History There have been so many innovations upon innovations, versions, and even name changes, that what we call now "piano" is very different from what it was long ago. Same can be said about other concepts like "country of citizenship", which is not a valid concept when talking about historic people. When we are creating an item we are capturing a moment of time of the past, according to a source in a different past. Eventually this item might change its label, change its meaning, or become obsolete. So when I look in Wikidata for: - a way to reflect label changes over time: yes, that will be possible with the mono-lingual datatype + qualifiers, creating a property "label" - a way to reflect that the concept is obsolete: perhaps it could be reflected with start/end date - a way to indicate a different item with a related meaning: it can be done with properties This information is not about the item itself, but we treat it as other statements. In my opinion these kind of statements are different (as labels, or descriptions), since they don't refer to the represented entity, but to the container that represents the entity. Like the walls of a bubble. I can imagine that there will be some confusion between labels that can accept qualifiers, other than don't, and aliases that can edited in one language but not in other, and all this not grouped with other statements that belong to the same metadata group. So I candidly ask: does it make sense to treat item metadata statements just as any other statement? Would it bring more confusion or less? Cheers, Micru
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