Talk:Q5098204

Should this item be restored?

This item up to a short time ago contained two links to general and fairly large articles about the general global concept "Childrens ombudsman", namely, w:en:Children's ombudsman and w:es:Ombudsman de los Niños. These two now are orphaned. There also was a dab page w:sv:Barnombudsmannen, and two fairly short and rather specific articles about the Norwegian Children's Ombudsman, namely w:no:Barneombudet and w:nn:Barneombodet. The description mainly was based on the enwiki article, and thus referring to the general concept. The enwiki, nowiki, and nnwiki articles were the ones present when the item was created.

Now, the IP 84.211.227.26 has moved the svwiki link to Q5098047 (which was reasonable), orphaned the enwiki and eswiki links (which was less so), and has changed descriptions and properties to fit only for the Norwegian Children's Ombudsman. (From time line considerations, I suspect that this was done as a response to a globalisation template I added to the nowiki item, but I don't know; the IP seems to be rather competent in handling data properties, but not when it comes to summaries or discussions.) Separating the general children's ombudsmen from the Norway one in itself seems reasonable. I easily could complete this by creating a new joint item for the enwiki and the eswiki articles, which clearly should be joint; and this seems to be the easiest way to handle this.

However, I'm unsure about the stress this project puts on the involved principles. The net effect would be a deconfusion, but also that one existing item (Q5098204) would change character (from concerning the global concept to just the specific one for one country), and that a newly created item essentially will take over the old description of Q5098204. Is it OK to do this (the easy thing), or should instead the old state of this item be restored, and a new item be created for the Norwegian articles? JoergenB (talk) 21:41, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

• Wikidata items are meant to be stable about a given concept. That scope is essentially determined by its type (P31/P279), label, description and other statements.

If a linked Wikipedia article is re-written, the sitelink is generally moved to whatever item would be appropriate.

It still happens that not all sitelinks are about the same concept.

To untangle mismatches, wasn't that one of the reasons one opted for Wikidata instead of interwikis in the first place? --- Jura 14:10, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

• Wikidata items ideally stay stable. The action of 84.211.227.26 should be undone. To the extend that Norwegian Children's Ombudsman should have it's own item that should be a new item and not reuse the general item while creating a new item for the general concept.

This usage is problematic because it might very well be that a person has a statement that they are employed as a Children's Ombudsman. That statement would be made wrong by narrowing the scope of the item to the Norwegian Children's Ombudsman. The item might also be linked by sources outside of Wikidata in that way. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:21, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

• @ChristianKl: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q5098204&oldid=1193700233 was Norway specific. --- Jura 15:25, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

• Okay, then it seems fine. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:27, 17 August 2020 (UTC)