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| An editor has requested the community to provide input on "A Gadget to Restrict the World" via the Requests for comment (RFC) process. This is the discussion page regarding the issue.
If you have an opinion regarding this issue, feel free to comment below. Thank you! |
In Restricting the World Denny Vrandecic argued that Wikidata shouldn't restrict the ability of users to set the country of a Paris as Goat Cheese.
Denny brings a good example where it's hard to model Roman senator that could have been a donkey. A system that strongly enforces it's types might prevent a user from entering a senator who's a donkey. This demonstrates that it's useful to have a way to enter such a dataset. On the other hand it doesn't demonstrate that it should be easy to enter such a dataset.
Wikidata could have a Gadget that enabled by default that restricts the data that can be entered. One very useful restriction centers around "instance of". If I want to add a family name of a person, Wikidata would help me a lot if it only shows concepts that have the property "instance of":"family name". In a case where Wikidata has no concept at the moment it might show me 10 different hits that have the same spelling as the family name but that are different concepts. It would help me lot if Wikidata would simply show me an empty list when there no concept with "instance of":"family name".
I think it would help most people, because it would reduce the complexity of entering new data when Wikidata only shows you valid choices. However anybody who feels constraint by the feature could simply deactivate the gadget. Good UI can make simple tasks easy and complex tasks still possible.
As far as I know "family name" has no subclasses but when it comes to classes that have subclasses, items tagged with the subclasses should also be in the list.
– The preceding unsigned comment was added by ChristianKl (talk • contribs).