User talk:Tpt/Support of external ids

Tpt, thank you for this suggestion. As discussed briefly on IRC, here's my thinking on external IDs:

• external IDs are often faulty. It is reasonably seldom the case that we have an ID-system that has no duplicate IDs for different entities, and even more often the other way around. This makes a any rigid system -- i.e. one where the 1-1 or even just the n-1 or 1-n relation -- potentially fragile.
• external IDs can change from time to time. Think about ZIP codes. This means, qualifiers might be useful.

In short, I would suggest that instead of using the sitelink feature -- where we require a 1-1 mapping due to other reasons -- we should use claims as they will be introduced in Phase 2. Use a datatype like string or text, and then further assign the property a few extra properties which would require in-system implementation, maybe like URL pattern (so that they can be linked and exported appropriately) or validation regexps.

Does this make sense? --Denny Vrandečić (WMDE) (talk) 12:33, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, It make sense. But if we use claim for IDs, I think that a special datatype, called something like "id", extend of string, may be a good idea in order to separate strings that are exported as string and IDs that are exported as URI. An important feature to add in that case is to create a special page that list IDs that are the same in more than one page in order to clean possible errors more easily. I'm volunteer to implement these feature when it will be time to add them. Tpt (talk) 13:24, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

That would be awesome! :) Yes, that sounds like it would make sense. We should talk about this once we have the string datatype. --Denny Vrandečić (WMDE) (talk) 12:09, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Authority control: 1) Most important are en:Universal Authority File (GND), LCCN and VIAF. VIAF is very helpful, but only a collection of authority control data, not the original source (see de:Hilfe:Normdaten). French Wikipedia also uses BNF and SUDOC, Czech Wikipedia NKCR and Japanese Wikipedia NDL and CiNii.

2) Is it possible to integrate the parameter "TYP" from the GND, like de:Template:Normdaten does? The parameter "TYP" notes the seven basic types (entities) of authority control. The output on the screen is: "Authority control (person): ...", "Authority control (place): ..." etc. For machines this info is not too important, but for a human reader it's essential if the item has less common titles like "Peter Smith" and "London". --Kolja21 (talk) 18:56, 16 November 2012 (UTC)