Joeyconnick
Welcome to Wikidata, Joeyconnick!
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Descriptions on film items edit
Hi Joeyconnick. Please note that film items on Wikidata usually use a standardized description in the form of "[year] film directed by [director]". It seems you're changing quite a lot of descriptions back to less useful descriptions copied from the English Wikipedia. But descriptions on Wikidata items and Wikipedia short descriptions have slightly different purposes. So the descriptions chosen by editors on Wikipedia aren't always preferable here on Wikidata, where descriptions are mainly for disambiguation purposes. 2A02:810B:580:11D4:D1E0:2C7F:8E03:2A39 15:30, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
- Hi... can you point me to the guidelines on Wikidata that specify that? Because that's giving film directors more primacy than is warranted, as it often takes hundreds of people to make a film and certainly the writer(s) and actors, at least, are contributing as significantly to a film's creation. Listing a film by year and genre is hardly "less useful" (especially given many directors are less well known than, say, the actors who appear in their films). So unless there's a clear established written consensus at Wikidata that specifies a standardized form of the type you are describing, I don't think describing them by year and genre poses any issues, and indeed in some cases may be more useful. —Joeyconnick (talk) 16:20, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Joey. You can find a guideline here, though like most rules on Wikidata it has never been fleshed out much. You could also ask for other editors' opinion on Wikidata talk:WikiProject Movies of course.
- While there are of course many people working on a film, the director is usually credited as the main contributor. Most authority control sources and other databases we use here, use the director(s) as the main or only contributor to the work. Genres on the other hand aren't really standardized in any way and tend to vary between many sources, making them less suitable for finding/identifying the correct Wikidata item. You have to consider that the purpose of descriptions on Wikidata is mainly disambiguation between similar items and supporting easy reconcilliation with other data sources. Most of the time, editors won't be looking specifically for a work they have seen and know well enough to know the genres, but will likely work on a large number of works in conjunction with external databases and sources. The director is comparatively easy to compare to a source, and combined with the date and type of work (film, short film) makes for pretty unique descriptor. So when trying to match works between Wikidata and external sources (e.g. in Open Refine, Mix'n'match or other tools), a standardized description that includes information that is also available in a standardized way in those sources is much more helpful. Regards, --2A02:810B:580:11D4:39DC:D613:E38C:CAE4 04:03, 29 September 2022 (UTC)