User:Dan Polansky/Label

This page is about labels in Wikidata.

Help page[edit]

There is a help page:

Help:Label
- It has no formal status of a policy or guideline.
- The status text says: "It is proposed that this informational page become a policy or guideline. Please see the discussion on its talk page or the project chat. The following is a proposed Wikidata policy or guideline. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption."
- "Help" is a wrong namespace for policies and guidelines; arguably, it should be in Wikidata namespace.
- It is probably best treated as an overridable policy since editors are likely to enforce it even if it is formally no policy.

There is no formal attestation requirement on labels, in the sense of Wiktionary. In the English Wiktionary, an English term (word or phrase or other) has to have at least 3 quotations of use in certain kinds of sources to be included, and this is called attestation requirement.
Attestation requirement would seem ideal.
Sometimes labels are used that see no use or very little use. This can be useful for less well attested languages so that they can have any label at all.
- For "non-preferred term", there is entered Russian "непредпочтительный термин", which sees very little use. Under Wiktionary attestation requirements, it would be excluded. However, "предпочтительный термин" without "не" is well attested.

Links:

"Reflect common usage. Because the aim is to use the name that an item would be known by to the most readers, labels should reflect common usage."

More:

Accuracy: It is not clear what to do with concepts that do not have any common English label, e.g. the concept for German "Bodenschatz", which does not exactly correspond to "mineral resource". It would seem it is preferable to use an accurate label even if it is not in common use. Otherwise the reader may get the wrong impression that the label is actually used in reference to the entity/concept.

In "polysemy", there are labels "polysemic" and "polysemous". Whether that is widely supporter practice is unknown.

Links:

Unlike Wikipedia, Wikidata disrecommends disambiguating brackets and some editors remove them when they seem them.
Thus, it is "thesaurus", not "thesaurus (IR)" and "thesaurus (dictionary)".
The absence is a pity since the label no longer uniquely identifies the concept.
Consequence: One cannot quickly spot mistakes in entities that reference the wrong concept.

Links: