User talk:EU explained

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-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:21, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Disambiguation information in label vs description

Hi,

I've noticed that you've been changing the text of labels, from for example, "Secretary of State for Education" to "Secretary of State for Education (UK)". On Wikidata (unlike Wikipedia), this disambiguation should go in the description, not in the label: see Help:Label, and particularly Help:Label#Disambiguation_information_belongs_in_the_description. If you need this information in some other context, I'd suggest generating it dynamically by combining the label with the contents of the applies to jurisdiction (P1001) field.

--Oravrattas (talk) 13:43, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the problem is, if you have a wikidata item that has list of education ministers under "has part", then its very hard to distinguish between them. I suggest we leave the country in the name, and then use the "title" label to add the official title. EU explained (talk) 15:58, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunately there are multiple problems with that. If this is to be the way to distinguish cases like this, then we need to do it for every such position, in every country, in every language — not just the EU positions, in English. Then we would need to have a consistent way of doing that, so that tools that do not need this extra disambiguation can know how to strip it off (and tools to check for places that aren't following that, etc) — and all to fulfil quite an obscure use case. I'm assuming you're talking here about items like European Schools (Q30104861)? (BTW: I'm not entirely sure this is modelled in a particularly useful way generally — at the very least this should be using has part(s) of the class (P2670) rather than has part(s) (P527), but even then I suspect you want to get some extra discussion going on how to best model this. Adding a reference to that authority (P797): junta (Q239463), would be helpful if you want people to assist with that — I couldn't see at a glance any information about this on the official website (P856) link.) I would say that it's significantly more common that someone would want a list of all the Cabinet positions in the UK, for example, where having an extra "(UK)" on the end of all the labels would be redundant, and having it on the end of some of the labels (e.g. the ones that have equivalents across the EU), even worse. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "title label". If you mean title (P1476), then that's currently only for the domain of creative works. It would certainly be good to have official name (P1448) filled in for all of these positions, but (a) that's going to be a much more verbose title in lots of cases (e.g. "Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Education"), and (b) will only apply to the official languages of the country — many such positions won't have such a name in English, never mind in, say, Korean. This is all also redundant — we already have a way to distinguish which country these belong to — applies to jurisdiction (P1001). Yes, that means that a bare list of labels won't necessarily make as much sense, but Wikidata is primarily meant to be machine readable, with human readability a distant second, and it's much easier for a machine to combine two structured fields than to strip semi-structured text out of a field. And for the human readable case, a SPARQL query to list them all, including the country, is going to be not only more readable, but can also list all the countries you're interested in, with gaps for ones where the position is currently not filled, rather than a human having to be able to spot that by eye. I would suggest you help ensure that each of these positions has all the fields correctly filled in that will not only help your use-case, but many others too — e.g. a applies to jurisdiction (P1001), being part of (P361) an item that can be found as the national cabinet, etc. so that these sorts of awkward short-cuts become much more unnecessary. I'm very willing to help out with this. --Oravrattas (talk) 07:36, 14 June 2017 (UTC)