Talk:Q6581097

Duplicate

It looks like this is a duplicate of Q44148. Firilacroco (talk) 11:33, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

This item is supposed to be used for humans in Property:P21, because Q44148 is awkward there. See Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2013/03#Statement p21 (sex) should not use q43445 (female) as value. --Zolo (talk) 12:54, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

For a list of items with both, see http://toolserver.org/~magnus/ts2/php/wd_query.php?q=[%22Q44148%22,%22Q6581097%22]

Maybe there is a way to remove the "old" property by bot. --  Docu  at 11:01, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

aliases

I added English "shortcut" aliases to these two properties because they will be so widely used, and because searching for "male" and "female" in English gives numerous inaccurate results before the correct ones. I expect a purist to object, but anyway. The aliases are, for females, "sf" (sex female), and "sg" (sex male/"guy")--chosen only to be entered with the left hand easily. Regards, Espeso (talk) 18:08, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

I added "mal" which makes selections for "male" easier. Otherwise one has to type "male", then select from the list (I think it wasn't even on the first part). --- Jura 06:30, 12 July 2015 (UTC)

Ambiguity

This appears to be conflating the characteristic of being "male" with the thing "male" or "male person". These should be two distinct concepts. — GPHemsley (talk) 03:17, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

I fixed it by creating male human (Q84048850) and female human (Q84048852). Robin van der Vliet (talk) (contribs) 15:53, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Please specify more clearly the scope of the new items. Otherwise they seem to be used interchangeably with Q6581097/Q6581072 and should be merged back. --Infovarius (talk) 20:03, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

subclass of

Male can't be a subclass of human: some fictional characters can be male but not human like Sarek (Q2712069), father of Spock in Star Trek universe. Snipre (talk) 11:24, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Merging with Q44148

Humans are animals. I see no good reason why male (Q6581097) shouldn't be merged with male organism (Q44148). When we call the merged item "male" I see no real disadvantage over the status quo. On the other hand, there would be a huge advantage because "male" would become the first hit that appears when you type "male" into instance of (P31). Of course the same argument also goes for female organism (Q43445) and female (Q6581072). ChristianKl (✉) 03:19, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

I couldn't agree more - this has been annoying me for months now. Jane023 (talk) 09:49, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Seems like you want to fix a software flaw with a content simplification, so  Oppose at this point. Separate human/non-human items are useful for expensive queries. —MisterSynergy (talk) 11:29, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

@MisterSynergy: Could you give an example of a query where this is important? In many cases where you want real humans, you have to specify human (Q5) anyway because fictional humans are also using male (Q6581097). At the moment we have 1900 female organism (Q43445), 4623 male organism (Q44148), 1814 female (Q6581072) fictional character (Q95074), 3174 male (Q6581097) fictional character (Q95074). Naive users who think that using this property actually filters to having only human (Q5) would get wrong results from their queries.

In general a lot of our attempt at creating properties that aren't special purpose but that can be used more generally result in more expansive queries. We could have cheaper queries if we would replace every combination of significant event (P793) with a qualifier with it's own property but we don't.

Having human/non-human maleness in the same item makes it easier for new users to learn how to specify sex or gender (P21) even if the sorting problem would be solved. Reducing the complexity of our content to make Wikidata more approachable has benefits.

My first instinct was to complaing about the sorting algorithm. I did talk with Lydia about the software and after I had that conversation, I spent more effort to look into why the algorithm might find that it makes sense to sort "male organsim" higher. The fact that male (Q6581097) has no sitelinks and male organism (Q44148) has a lot is likely the reason. Tuning around it might not make sense. Telling the software that if the item that's edited is instance of (P31) human (Q5) it should know that male (Q6581097) is meant seems to be a solution that leads to queries that have to be made every time a property gets filled that are too expensive. ChristianKl (✉) 13:06, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Taxonomy has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.

ChristianKl (talk) 15:11, 24 June 2017 (UTC) Melderick (talk) 12:22, 25 July 2017 (UTC) Richard Arthur Norton Jklamo (talk) 20:21, 14 October 2017 (UTC) Sam Wilson Gap9551 (talk) 18:41, 5 November 2017 (UTC) Jrm03063 (talk) 15:46, 22 May 2018 (UTC) Salgo60 (talk) 18:10, 18 June 2018 (UTC) Egbe Eugene (talk) Eugene233 (talk) 03:40, 19 June 2018 (UTC) Dcflyer (talk) 07:45, 9 September 2018 (UTC) Gamaliel (talk) 13:01, 12 July 2019 (UTC) Pablo Busatto (talk) 11:51, 24 August 2019 (UTC) Theklan (talk) 19:25, 20 December 2019 (UTC) SM5POR (talk) 20:17, 29 May 2020 (UTC) Pmt (talk) 23:22, 27 June 2020 (UTC) CarlJohanSveningsson (talk) 12:13, 30 July 2020 (UTC) Ayack (talk) 14:39, 12 October 2020 (UTC) EthanRobertLee (talk) 19:17, 20 December 2020 (UTC) -- Darwin ^Ahoy! 18:20, 25 December 2020 (UTC) Germartin1 (talk) 03:13, 30 December 2020 (UTC) Skim (talk) 00:13, 10 January 2021 (UTC) El Dubs (talk) 21:55, 29 April 2021 (UTC) CAFLibrarian (talk) 16:36, 30 September 2021 (UTC) Jheald (talk) 18:50, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Notified participants of WikiProject Genealogy ChristianKl (✉) 11:29, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

I did not look into this, but on the surface the distinction between "male human" / "male person" versus "male organism" does not strike me as odd. I am inclined to keep two items. - Brya (talk) 11:55, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

@Brya: It's not really "male human" but more like "male in a human way". The fact that the item in question is a human is already specified via instance of (P31). sex or gender (P21) is about a attribute of the subject. ChristianKl (✉) 23:09, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

This organism is a "male organism", but not "male human" / "male person". --Fractaler (talk) 12:16, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

• The problem is not that we have two descriptions for "male", it is that "male organism" is the first choice in the list. We need to change the sort order so that "human male" is always on the top of the list, so that choosing the most common one is easier. 50% of all biographical entries use "human male". I brought this up before. --RAN (talk) 14:36, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

• @Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): Saying, "male human" should rank higher doesn't solve the problem. It's just the desire to have the problem solved. To solve it we would actually need a solution. One solution would be merging. Do you support or oppose that solution? ChristianKl (✉) 23:09, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

male (Q6581097) is a subclass of male organism (Q44148). The items are useful to match with human vocabulary, for example. I’d recommand keeping them and using queries that takes into account the fact that both could actually be correct in queries about humans. A way to do this would be to label both classes as instance of a metaclass « sexual class », which could be set on any class that divides a species between its male and female elements.

For example, if you want to do a query for all human males, use a construction in SPARQL ?item P31/P279* Q5 ; P21 ?maleclass . ?maleclass P279* male organism (Q44148)    ; P31 "sexual class" . (not sure the "sexual class" item is needed actually. The sure thing is that excluding humans from male organism (Q44148) is useless.

author  TomT0m / talk page 15:31, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

I am not entirely convinced that male (Q6581097) is necessarily a subclass of male organism (Q44148). There may well be aspects of "human maleness" / "male personhood" that don't quite fall within the scope of "male organism". These are uncomfortably large concepts. - Brya (talk) 19:27, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Good point. I’m not entirely convinced that this point is not valid for animals as well, but it’s harder to establish :) Se. as a biological concept is already quite complex (hermaphrodites, change of sex at some point …) As usual in biology there is the model and the exceptions, as my teachers used to say. Maybe th epragmatic point is to be liberal on the use of the items and try to model wahat we can. Anyway this is also a BLP issue in the human case. author  TomT0m / talk page 11:04, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

@TomT0m: In what cases do you want to query for all nonfictional and fictional human males? It seems to me like in most cases a user that wants to query all human males only wants the nonfictional one's and will get wrong results when he queries according to your query. I think the case that someone actually wants all nonfictional and fictional human males is seldom enough that it makes sense for the user in those cases to be explicit about wanting both nonfictional and fictional ones. ChristianKl (✉) 23:09, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

For example in order to get statistics about names (or nationalities, or something else) for all humans (doesn't matter if he is a character or a real human). --Infovarius (talk) 14:49, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

I think that in most of those cases it would be prefereable for the user to specify that he wants to know both about names for fictional and real humans. Otherwise I would expect users to get answers that they don't intent. As the Zen of Python says "Explicit is better than implicit." ChristianKl (✉) 13:19, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

• I would not be opposed to a Q-number swap that gave "non human male" the higher number than "human male" as a compromise to solve the sort problem. If that is impossible, I will  Support to a merge. The lowest number one should be the one most used. I would also not be opposed to a recreation on non-human male with a new Q-number. --RAN (talk) 00:15, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

• The Q-number isn't important and swapping it wouldn't change anything. "male organism" is linked higher because of the site links. ChristianKl (✉) 13:21, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

• Am I right that mentioned problem about "male human vs male" in search field is specifically for English-speakers? (In Russian we have no problem with search field here). So you should talk about labels and aliases, not properties. --Infovarius (talk) 14:51, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

It's also an issue for German "männlich" vs. "männliches Geschlecht". ChristianKl (✉) 13:19, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

• It's worth noting that the status quo of the description of male organism (Q44148) is an argument against usage of Wikidata description in Wikipedia in the recent RfC. ChristianKl (✉) 20:01, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

spermatozoon (Q74560) (cell) is a organism? Male organism? Male animal? ♂? --Fractaler (talk) 07:27, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

• In Danish, there is a distinction between a non-human male/female ("han"/"hun") and a human male/female ("mand"/"kvinde" or "dreng"/"pige"). I suppose it is only in biology that a human is an animal. In society, e.g., a legal setting, a human is not an animal. For instance, with female (Q6581072) we can say that female (Q6581072) obtained suffrage (Q185387) in the 20th century (Q6927). We could not say that directly if it would become merged. — Finn Årup Nielsen (fnielsen) (talk) 19:11, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

  The dictionary gives "mandlig" as the Danish word for "male", the current Danish label seems to be wrong.

Neither of the items in question should be about a non-human male/female or a human male/female. For a female human we have woman (Q467) and for a male human we have man (Q8441). The items should be about the property of sex/gender that humans and other animals have.

In English you would usually say "Women obtained sufferage" and not "Females obtained sufferage". ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 14:08, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

That would be an argument for merging male (Q6581097) with man (Q8441), not with male organism (Q44148). But the English language does have a word "female", and this is being used. It does not mean exactly the same as "woman", or as "lady". - Brya (talk) 16:03, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

@Brya:Currently it seems like male (Q6581097) is messed up. It doesn't subclass human (Q5) but it does subclass indirectly eukaryote (Q19088) because it subclass male organism (Q44148). In addition to the subclass it also is an instance of sex of humans (Q4369513). Subclassing sex of humans (Q4369513) suggests that we don't mean something that's a subclass of human but that's a property that humans have. I think it's valuable for sex or gender (P21) to have values that are instances of gender (Q48277) and not subclass/instance of a taxon. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 00:42, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

girl (Q3031) is female (Q6581072) or female organism (Q43445)? boy (Q3010) is male (Q6581097) or male organism (Q44148)? Where is an indication of an adult organism? --Fractaler (talk) 17:40, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Description revised

Please see Wikidata:Project chat#User instructions in descriptions are harmful. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:32, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Instruction in description

The answer is "Male", with the definition being the description from Wikidata item Q6581097, "human who is male (use with Property:P21 sex or gender). For groups of males use with subclass of (P279)"

It seems like the problem discussed in Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2018/08#User instructions in descriptions are harmful returned here after two months. Boivie (talk) 09:23, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

@Boivie: Seems rather complex, because at least in some Chinese-build Orthodox churches, it's possible and just valid to say a male as "angel". --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:40, 16 June 2020 (UTC)