Wikidata:Property proposal/academic appointment

academic appointment[edit]

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control

Done: academic appointment (P8413) (Talk and documentation)

Description	this person has been appointed to a role within the given higher education institution or department; distinct from employment or affiliation
Data type	Item
Domain	people
Allowed values	typically, items which are instances of academic department (Q2467461)
Example 1	Seth R. Bordenstein (Q45943775) → Vanderbilt Department of Biological Sciences (Q78041310)
Example 2	Owen D. Jones (Q77516060) → Vanderbilt University Law School (Q7914456)
Example 3	Ivan Khorin (Q4499927) → Moscow University's Department of Philosophy (Q3064305)
See also	employer (P108) affiliation (P1416) member of (P463)

Motivation[edit]

This provides a method for accurately depicting affiliation(s) within an academic institution at a department level and providing details about the individual's research interests and place in career. --Eshook (talk) 17:10, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

We suggest using as a qualifier the property "series ordinal" (P1545) value of "1" for the primary appointment and "2" for secondary appointment(s). "Ranking" (P1352) is probably not appropriate for this purpose since it has type constraints that seem to preclude its use as a qualifier. Baskaufs (talk) 18:30, 11 December 2019 (UTC) WikiProject Wikidata for research has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.. Clifford Anderson (talk) 19:14, 12 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Support: good idea. Nomen ad hoc (talk) 16:58, 12 December 2019 (UTC).[reply]

Support: Mlemusrojas (talk) 14:13, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Question: doesn't employer (P108) fill this role, or are there many cases where it is not an employment relationship? ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:40, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Ah, and for cases of not-necessarily-employment we also already have affiliation (P1416). I'm not sure what this proposal adds to these existing properties. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:42, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - With this suggestion, we are hoping to more accurately represent the relationships faculty have with departments in higher education. employer (P108) will still be used. affiliation (P1416) does not depict the relationship in such a way that is meaningful to higher education. In addition, the use of "academic appointment" will allow universities to utilize wikidata for research impact tracking by providing a more narrow property than employer or affiliation.--Eshook (talk) 19:33, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - The term "academic appointment" has a more specific meaning than "affiliation," I think. A faculty member will have a primary appointment at a university and may also have many secondary appointments. For instance, a faculty member at a university may have a primary appointment in the department of religious studies in the School of Arts and Sciences and secondary appointments in the faculty of teaching and learning in the School of Education as well as the department of psychiatry in the School of Medicine. When trying to model scholarly communications, we want to account for these primary and secondary appointments across institutions. Affiliation is a broader term, which could be used to indicate that a faculty member belongs to a Center for Digital Humanities or takes part in a trans-institutional grant program. I imagine that both will be used when modeling faculty relations, but I'd suggest they are sufficiently distinct as concepts to warrant distinguishing them as properties. Clifford Anderson (talk) 19:47, 13 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  - Although a person with an academic appointment would also be affiliated with a department, there are also people affiliated with departments that are not faculty with appointments. For example, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff are affiliates that do not have academic appointments. The proposed property would make it possible to query for faculty with primary or secondary appointments in a department or college, while excluding those other categories of affiliates. Baskaufs (talk) 19:09, 16 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose use employer. --- Jura 10:27, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- @Jura1: employer is clearly wrong, at best affiliation (P1416) could be used but is not precise enough (see below). --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:22, 24 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Agree with Jura. You can use more than one employer if you wanna reflect organization and department. Circeus (talk) 21:46, 3 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I'm confused about the opposes above. As was explained, an academic appointment is not the same employment or affiliation. This would model a different, specific type of relationship a person may have with an academic department or institute. Using "employer" would be a bit like saying members of Congress should simply be described as employees of Congress, rather than stating the offices they hold.
Generally, the employment relationship would be with the university, not the department. I've added this more explicitly in the "allowed values" above. Also, an academic appointment does not necessarily imply actual employment (for example, depending on how emeritus appointments work at the institution), and a person with employment at the institution could hold appointments with multiple departments (or none). For these reasons, a distinct property makes sense. Dominic (talk) 17:02, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Baskaufs, Clifford Anderson, Dominic, Eshook: Rereading the above discussion it is not clear to me that even you all agree on the meaning of these terms; I don't see how a third property along these lines could possibly be viewed with anything but confusion by an average Wikidata user. Why would emeritus professors have a different property than visiting scholars and research staff? If you can provide a third-party reference that clearly describes the distinction between these 3 relations (and in ways that are not specific to a small number of institutions but in some way universal around the world) then maybe I could see a point. But it seems to me the relation is either one of employment (in some kind of position with a subsidiary of the organization as a whole) or affiliation without employment, covered by the two existing properties. Note also that for the vast majority of academic institutions Wikidata only has items for the university as a whole; if there is anything else then maybe major subsidiaries such as an engineering or medical school, very rarely individual departments. So I don't see a more finely grained property, if that is the key distinction being made, actually being very useful here anyway. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:10, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank you, ArthurPSmith, for these remarks. You are right that capturing a precise definition is challenging because the term "appointment" differs slightly from university to university, making it hard to define the extension in the abstract. That said, the faculty manuals of institutions provide guidance about how to use apply the term: see Berkeley, Chinese University of Hong Kong, UVA, etc. Like other information in the realm of scholarly communications, we would most likely gather this information from CVs and from faculty websites. But, stepping back, maybe it helps to share more about the longterm goal. You are also quite right that Wikidata does not currently delve into the internal structure of university beyond, perhaps, the school and college level (i.e. School of Engineering, Law School, etc.) But, as Wikidata develops as a tool for scholarly communications, I see it encroaching into the territory of Research Information Management systems or RIMs. I believe that, over time, Wikidata could become a credible open source alternative to these proprietary systems, particularly for smaller schools and Global South institutions that cannot afford the commercial products. RIMs include information about faulty appointments to departments as that's needed for benchmarking with similar faculty at peer institutions. Right now, we're trying to chart out the data model but, again, I agree completely that it's early days in this effort and it pushes Wikidata to a new level of specificity in describing the internal structure of universities. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Clifford Anderson (talk • contribs) at 15:26, May 20, 2020‎ (UTC).
  - @Clifford Anderson: all three of your references appear to me to put "appointment" in a clear context of "employment" - in particular the UVA page is titled "Faculty Appointments and Employment". Do you have a reference that makes an actual distinction between "appointment" and "employment"? ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:17, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    - @ArthurPSmith: Employment is a property that applies very broadly to faculty, staff, and even students at universities. In most cases, a faculty member with an appointment will be employed by a university. But the terms are not co-extensive. There are also appointments that do not imply an employer/employee relationship. See, for example, the list of non-salaried faculty appointments at Iowa State University and the Non-Employee Appointments at the University of Montana, indicating that faculty with "affiliate" or "courtesy" appointments are not employees. From what I understand, this distinction exists in non-US systems as well. For instance, I believe a Privatdocent has a teaching appointment but would not be considered an employee in the German system. And, as has already been mentioned above, an emeritus faculty member has an appointment without an ongoing employment relationship. In addition, faculty appointments (particularly secondary appointments) may shift over time while the employment remains stable. So I believe the concepts are distinct, though in many cases overlapping.
    - @ArthurPSmith: see my explanation below, appointment is a sub-class of "affiliated" and distinct from employment. Appointed is a very special affiliation. It is quite common that a professor is employed outside the university (by a private company, a hospital or a research institute like the Max Planck institute) but *appointed* to a University / University Department. This may potentially be modelled by affiliation (P1416) however it is imprecise, since there are many people who are affiliation (P1416) with a department but do not have a faculty appointment (e.g. all students, all research staff and all postdocs are affiliated and even potentially employed but do not have a faculty appointment). One alternative could be to use affiliation (P1416) with a qualifier "appointed" but I dont think that is a good solution. Regarding your question: an emeritus professor is different from a visiting scholar in that the emeritus professor has been appointed to his/her position by the whole department or the university for his/her merits in research which is a difficult hurdle to clear. A visiting scholar or research staff on the other hand may simply be an employee of said professor that have never been vetted and approved of by the whole department. --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:22, 24 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support: Academic appointments, especially for adjunct and temporary faculty along with honorary faculty who may be unpaid, are really different than an employer-employee relationship. This is a gap in Wikidata now, and is a useful addition. I support this. --- FULBERT (talk) 19:05, 25 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

( Support} There are many complicated circumstances that can be covered here: a single person could have a joint or secondary appointment in several departments, and also several institutes within the uiversity, , and with a department of an affiliated hospital, , and with an academic departments elsewhere (such as retaining a relationship with past institutions) These can be difficult to disientagle (tho we usually try in WP if we an find a full CV), but at least they should be recorded here. DGG (talk) 01:17, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

{ Oppose Use employer, with qualifiers. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:59, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support there is a clear distinction here and allows us to model complex academic relationships:
- employer (P108) is the organization that pays the salary of a person (this can be a company, hospital or the university)
- affiliation (P1416) means that the person is affiliated with the department (in one of many roles, as a student, as a research associate or as a professor). this is often what is reported on a paper and *can be* the same as the employer but is not in the case of a student who is not paid
- appointed has a very distinct role as mostly professors are "appointed" to a department and has a honorific component to it. Being appointed to a department usually has a component of selection to it and provides unique privileges that that are not covered by "affiliated", e.g. a professor may be allowed to teach or supervise students in that department. This category is a *subclass* of affiliated (all appointed people of X are affiliated with X but not the other way around)

As an example: Professor X may be employed by a private research institute (Max Planck institute) and may be a appointed to a nearby University (TMU) where s/he works with students who are affiliated with TMU or research associates and postdocs that are employed by TMU (neither students nor research associates are appointed to TMU). I hope how this highlights the different concepts. --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:12, 24 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Hannes Röst, Clifford Anderson, DGG: @FULBERT, Baskaufs, Dominic, Eshook: There seems to me some special pleading going on here about the uniqueness of academic institutions, but I don't buy it. Nonacademic nonprofit organizations and corporations all have employees of varying degrees of status, some may even be unpaid (interns or volunteers), and yet they are "employed" by the organization (or a more specific subdivision or department) in the sense that the organization tells them what to do, provides some level of facilities for them, and allows them to represent it in some fashion. If we need to be more specific about the relationship between an employee and their employer, we have qualifiers like position held (P39) that are perfectly adequate. If there is really a case that can't be handled by employer (P108) then please add a specific example of that sort to the examples presented so far and we can discuss it more, but it seems to me employer (P108) works just fine for all the cases that have been raised so far. ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:44, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ArthurPSmith: here is a good example from my own University: Michael D. Wilson (Q37623673) is an employee of the Hospital for Sick Children (Q3140964) but *not* of the University of Toronto (Q180865) -- employer (P108) ("person or organization for which the subject works or worked") only applies to Hospital for Sick Children (Q3140964) while for University of Toronto (Q180865) another term that is a subclass of affiliation (P1416) would be more appropriate (academic appointment in this sense). Michael D. Wilson (Q37623673) and all people in his lab are employees of the Hospital for Sick Children (Q3140964) while his students are employees of Hospital for Sick Children (Q3140964) and students at the University of Toronto (Q180865). In his role as a supervisor for these students, Michael D. Wilson (Q37623673) is appointed at the U of T but not employed at the U of T. As others have stated before, the situation is somewhat similar to members of congress and other elected officials: while technically they could be classified as being affiliated with Congress (affiliation (P1416)) that simply does not seem to fully capture it completely. --Hannes Röst (talk) 14:46, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Hannes Röst: University of Toronto doesn't pay Michael D. Wilson (Q37623673), I understand that, but if he supervises U of T students, isn't that "doing work" for the university? Why is that not considered employment? ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:25, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ArthurPSmith: I think you make a good point and it can be considered "doing work" from a certain perspective, however there are some distinct characteristics. The reason I would not consider it employment is that the appointment to U of T comes with a set of obligations and privileges, one such privilege is the right to supervise students. Michael D. Wilson (Q37623673) will not be payed per student and is under no obligation to supervise any students but if he chooses so, he may take students into his lab. Again, the comparison is much closer to being appointed to an organization (or private members club) that provides rights and privileges such as entry to the clubhouse etc -- or becoming a member of fraternity as a student (nobody would say that a fraternity member is an employee of the fraternity or a member of a private members club is an employee of the club). Another good comparison are the Royal Society to which members are appointed (they are not employees of the society but members / fellows). Again the more correct term would be that someone is a member of a club / affiliated with the club / appointed to become a member. --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:41, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Support Ok, I'll buy that distinction. member of (P463) presumably isn't suitable even with an alias as the meaning isn't quite the same. I think the description here needs to be a lot clearer though; I've made an attempt at rewriting it, is that ok? ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:51, 26 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]