Talk:Q629
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Autodescription — oxygen (Q629)
description: chemical element, symbol O and atomic number 8
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- Report on constraint conformation of “oxygen” claims and statements. Constraints report for items data
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This item conflates two distinct things: the element 8O and its most common terrestrial elemental form O2. That is how things actually are in the Authority Control world, so... we have to tolerate it to some extent. However, the English description refers only to the element. I would just change it but I'm not sure what to change it to. I think it must include the O2, which I am inclined to refer to as a w:chemical species. Any thoughts?
More broadly, is there a consensus around how to disentangle the conflation, so that (for example) the liquid oxygen item can be understood to be a state of the O2 species?
- This is the problem from the beginnings of the WD: mixing the concepts of 'chemical element' and 'chemical substance' in one item. There were several discussions about this, but nothing really happened, and this problem is true for many chemical elements. I'd advise you to write about it in Wikidata:WikiProject Chemistry. Wostr (talk) 16:26, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- Ah, is that the problem? It looks as though the properties are trying to be properties of the element while the identifiers have a broader scope. Then we get qualities of the simple substance which properly belong to O2 (as a gas), which ought to go over to dioxygen. Thanks, I'll head over there. No need to be changing the English description for now! --GrounderUK (talk) 17:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- @Wostr, GrounderUK: It is not correct to say that nothing was done to distinguish between O et O2: we have this item about oxygen as element and another for dioxygen (Q5203615) and another one for ozone (Q36933). Same for chlorine (Q688) and dichlorine (Q1904422), for nitrogen (Q627) and dinitrogen (Q2370426),... The only thing which is not currently well defined are metals: element and metal substance are still mixed and should be separated. The ontology in WD is correcting these concept mixings, but the real problem is the contributors who add data in WD without taking care of these differences. Then we have bots importing data without a close check and adding data to the wrong items. As long as we don't reduce the mass importations and we select cleaning of data before the importation into WD, we will have these problems and a huge work of data curation. Too few persons are working on data curation compared to those adding new sets of data, so if you see errors then you can transfer the statements to the correct by using the tool Move (see in page Wikidata:Tools/Edit_items). Snipre (talk) 20:04, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- By the way, if you want to contribute to help people to find the correct items, then you can add items in the following table. Snipre (talk) 20:38, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- By 'nothing really happened' I meant that not very long ago I've seen that some items about simple substances (metals I think) were merged into items about chemical elements. We don't have any written guidelines about this, so even if someone clean this mess, it can be undone in the future by some other user thinking that chemical element = pure substance. Wostr (talk) 22:58, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- @Wostr, GrounderUK: It is not correct to say that nothing was done to distinguish between O et O2: we have this item about oxygen as element and another for dioxygen (Q5203615) and another one for ozone (Q36933). Same for chlorine (Q688) and dichlorine (Q1904422), for nitrogen (Q627) and dinitrogen (Q2370426),... The only thing which is not currently well defined are metals: element and metal substance are still mixed and should be separated. The ontology in WD is correcting these concept mixings, but the real problem is the contributors who add data in WD without taking care of these differences. Then we have bots importing data without a close check and adding data to the wrong items. As long as we don't reduce the mass importations and we select cleaning of data before the importation into WD, we will have these problems and a huge work of data curation. Too few persons are working on data curation compared to those adding new sets of data, so if you see errors then you can transfer the statements to the correct by using the tool Move (see in page Wikidata:Tools/Edit_items). Snipre (talk) 20:04, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- @Snipre, Wostr: Thanks, Snipre. This was my conclusion. Ultimately it's the external Authorities (identifiers, Wikidata property for authority control by VIAF member (Q55586529)...) that need to be sorted out. Or rather (since they are real-world facts too), the identifiers for the broader (encyclopaedic, information science) topic "oxygen" need a different target (Q-item) from the identifiers that are specific to the element O. It's clear that the works listed under Library of Congress authority ID (P244) LoC do not deal primarily with oxygen as an element, for example, likewise JSTOR topic ID (P3827) JSTOR and UNESCO Thesaurus ID (P3916) UNESCO. Imprecisely placed identifiers will naturally attract data about the wrong subject... more ill-placed identifiers not least among them! I'm happy to help with the curation but I would need some sort of consensus about where we want to end up. At the moment, it seems to me that we need to leave Q629 as the broader topic and create a new narrower topic for the element O. This is because the libraries and journals of the world seem to be broadly consistent with one another (and with wikipedias in several languages) and they would not be quick to change their mappings to a new Wikidata item in any event. But I have no idea what the impact of a new narrower item might be, either within Wikidata or across Wikimedia. Meanwhile, is there a good (multilingual) way to clarify that the image (P18) has the narrower subject liquid oxygen (Q618153) instance of (P31) phase (Q104837) of (P642) dioxygen (Q5203615) instance of (P31) allotrope of oxygen (Q428653) has part(s) (P527) oxygen (Q629)? I think it would be a shame to have no image (P18) at all. --GrounderUK (talk) 23:14, 15 June 2020 (UTC)
- Ah, is that the problem? It looks as though the properties are trying to be properties of the element while the identifiers have a broader scope. Then we get qualities of the simple substance which properly belong to O2 (as a gas), which ought to go over to dioxygen. Thanks, I'll head over there. No need to be changing the English description for now! --GrounderUK (talk) 17:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)