[Tagging] Wikidata tag

Simone Saviolo simone.saviolo at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 15:44:38 UTC 2013


2013/2/27 Peter Wendorff <wendorff at uni-paderborn.de>

>  You "call for editor support" for a new external ID that's not
> controllable.
> You want it to be a replacement (well, you agree to keep the old tags, but
> your argumentation is that the old tags are not necessary any more with the
> existence of Wikidata.
>
> This contains several preconditions you assume to be fulfilled:
>
> 1) wikidata will not go away or change it's IDs before osm is dead.
> Maybe you're right; I think, for wikidata there is in fact a chance for
> this to happen.
>
> 2) wikidata will not change the meaning of the content of what there is
> behind any ID.
> I'm not sure here. As we refine an object by different new objects again
> and again the same might happen to wikidata, changing the meaning of e.g.
> Qxxxx (let's say McDonald's) from the brand of the many burger shops to the
> holding itself, while introducing Qxxxxy for the brand McDonalds, or
> refining Qxxxxx to be the holding itself, without containing McDonald's
> Germany and the other country-specific sub-companies. Sure: Users might
> again be able to follow the wikidata information network down to all
> country-specific sub-companies and pull all restaurants out of it, but
> that's not automatically again, I guess.
>
> Adding this might be acceptable for most mappers, but replacing our own
> data is a problem as it relies on wikidata to be correct and stay stable up
> to the meaning of entries, which is not guaranteed as far as I know (and I
> have now idea how this COULD be guaranteed AND kept up to date on the same
> time).
>
> 3) let's take another example, the "Eckmänneken", an old house in Warburg,
> Germany [1]. It's the oldest "Fachwerk" house in Germany and contains a
> greek restaurant. Both might be a valid reason to add it to wikidata, the
> restaurant business as well as the building itself.
> In OSM nevertheless both could be tagged on the same object (it is not,
> but it could be, and often that is the case). If you add a wikidata ID to
> it - would it be one to the restaurant or to the building? Or to both - how?
>
> IMHO it's okay to link to wikidata, but it doesn't help: Neither it does
> make live easier for mappers nor it reduces errors in the data. With tool
> support (as you propose) it might work, but without - and that's now the
> case - it's useless.
>
> I would suggest you to write the corresponding tool support first,
> supporting the wikidata id, show what's possible with that, and then spread
> the word about the tag itself; but the wikidata id as the id alone is
> useless and worse than not adding it in many cases.
>

While I don't agree that it would be "useless and worse than not adding
it", I appreciate your constructive criticism.

I guess most of the criticism will linger on as long as Wikidata is not
grown up. Which, I believe, is bad, also because the same criticism was
addressed to OSM in the past (it still is, sometimes).

Of course, a deeper understanding of how Wikidata deals with the scenarios
you describe will be needed.

Ciao,

Simone
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