Topic on User talk:Matthias Winkelmann

Hi, I just restored the item for Oskar Schindler (Q27518152). It is ok (and actually also ideal) to create own items for fictionalized versions of historical persons in order to not muddle information about the fictional character (e.g. narrative role (protagonist, antagonist), but also information about the relationship to other characters) with information about the real person. The presentation of characters in fictional works can differ substantially from what may be considered historically accurate. I added fictional analog of (P1074) to make clear that Oskar Schindler (Q27518152) is actually meant to represent Oskar Schindler (Q60029). Best wishes!

Strongly disagree...

There are dozens of movies and books that portrait Abraham Lincoln. Except for one opera, where the character is remarkably not the actual Abraham Lincoln, we never considered any discrepancies to the real person worthy of making that distinction and creating items for the character.

That includes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Q587707).

The 23 listed roles on Apollo 13 (Q106428) all link to the actual person they are supposedly representing. And so on... If you check the list of fictional characters based on real people, it is dominated by Shakespeare and Opera, two genres where the divergence of, say, the historical Macbeth and the one from the eponymous play is rather obvious.

So what does it say if we stray from common practice in the case of Oskar Schindler (Q27518152) and Schindler's List (Q483941)? Quite obviously, it raises doubts about the historical accuracy of the movie. It did this even in my mind, as I expected the enwiki article to include some sort of controversy that prompted this. To my surprise, there really aren't any accusations of factual inaccuracies made against the movie! (Apollo 13, btw, has a lengthy section discussing accuracy).

Comparing the two items, I noticed that there actually are no differences in any of the statements. That shows both that the depiction is accurate, and that there is no need for the split. Where the character is left-handed, the real person was as well!

With these two remaining good-faith interpretation of this modelling choice falling away, it can only be ascribed to the ever-present background noise of arbitrariness. And another interpretation, which I am sure anyone reading this far has already thought of: namely, that it falls somewhere between "alludes to" and "is instance of" Holocaust denial.

I'm merging them again. Feel free to undo after you've created items for each cultural representation of Abraham Lincoln, Hitler, Jesus, Jim Lovell, and New York.

The decision to differentiate between fictional characters and humans they are based on has nothing to do with denying that the events they were involved in happened.

It is to prevent the intermixture of fact and fiction generally. As @Jheald: expressed it at Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2020/01 (Splitting and merging fictional characters): "The point about having separate items for fictional counterparts of real people, distinct from the items for the actual real people, and only letting fictional characters interact with other fictional characters, is important. Otherwise we find statements like this getting batch-added to the items for real people."

There are always differences between the characterization of a person in fiction and the historical person. The historical accuracy of the depiction of Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List is contested, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/25/germany.film. Yes, there are no differences in statements, yet (apart from the instance of (P31) and narrative role (P5800)-statements you deleted), but there may be if somebody sets out to model the narrative of Schindler's List (Q483941). I will leave the item now as it is as the narrative of Schindler's List (Q483941) is not modelled at all so there is no loss of information that could not be easily restored if somebody sets out to model the narrative.

"Feel free to undo after you've created items for each cultural representation of Abraham Lincoln, Hitler, Jesus, Jim Lovell, and New York."

If this were English Wikipedia, I think a link to WP:ALLORNOTHING would be appropriate here. Since we are instead in Wikidata, I think it suffices to say that each aspect of editing has to be considered separately. For example, as you noted, Wikiproject Performing Arts has been majorly behind the effort to have separate items, in part because there was an import workflow in effect. It worked for them; whether it works in a given other instance relies a lot on context, I think.