Wikidata:Property proposal/Moravian Lives
Moravian Lives ID
[edit]Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person
| Description | Identifier for a person in the Moravian Lives database |
|---|---|
| Data type | External identifier |
| Domain | human (Q5) |
| Allowed values | mlper\d{6} |
| Example 1 | Nicolaus Zinzendorf (Q76336) → mlper000565 |
| Example 2 | Benjamin Ingham (Q4888851) → mlper000536 |
| Example 3 | Shikellamy (Q7496562) → mlper000537 |
| Planned use | We are going to begin generating named person entities that appear in Moravian Lives memoirs and want to establish @sameAs relationships for them |
| Formatter URL | http://moravianlives.bucknell.edu/data/personography.html#$1 |
Motivation
[edit]A major scholarly database studying the global movements and histories of members of the Moravian Church and their correspondencts. There are at least 60,000 ego documents (memoirs, diaries, correspondences) from the 18th century alone that the project is transcribing and making public, including those of women, indigenous, and enslaved peoples. This is data that is not currently captured in Wikidata very well and the two databases could well complement the other. This would also be a very useful complement to Social Networks and Archival Context (Q29861311) and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Q65056404) among others. The Moravian Lives item is Q84433238. (Add your motivation for this property here.) Dkjakacki (talk) 17:03, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Discussion
[edit]
Support creation of property to allow IDs to be recorded for persons in the database that already have Wikidata items.
- **But** I am dubious about creating new Wikidata items for people that do not already have Wikidata items -- in most cases it seems the database has rather little to say about them. Wikidata is not a general genealogical database. It is not a database of people for whom we know nothing other than their dates of birth and death. Also, while it's not a problem for Wikidata holding the identifiers, the project's current URL structure seems unsustainable -- you can't just dump 60,000 entries to a single web-page and expect people to find that usable. Your anchor links don't even appear to work for the limited number of entries you already have. Either have a server generating a unique web-page on demand for each entry, or if you absolutely have to serve static web pages, then limit the number of entries on each webpage and change the six-figure URLs to something like
.../mlper0005/65. Jheald (talk) 19:24, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
- Support with same qualification as Jheald Iwan.Aucamp (talk) 11:46, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you Jheald and Iawn.Aucamp for your helpful guidance, and with apologies for any confusion. The description of 60,000 memoirs was only to give an indication of the scope of the project - not a goal of creating 60,000 identifiers, or of creating a "personography" that only lists birth and death dates. We are working on subsets of people that connect with others that are known in other contexts. Also, we extend that work to include places as well as people. We are in the process of building an object oriented database that will better serve our data, and that should be live within the next few months. Please let me know if I can provide more detail. Dkjakacki (talk) 21:27, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
- Support I just wanna note that Dkjakachi is the project manager of Moravian Lives. --Trade (talk) 23:09, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
- Support --Frettie (talk) 07:15, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
- @Dkjakacki, Jheald, Trade, Frettie:
Done --Tinker Bell ★ ♥ 05:13, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
