Wikidata:Property proposal/creator

collection creator

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Creative work

   Done: collection creator (P6241) (Talk and documentation)

Description	entity (person, organization, etc.) that caused a record or collection to be produced or gathered
Represents	creator (Q59275219)
Data type	Item
Domain	generally, items which are a collection (Q2668072) or constituents of them (e.g. using "part of" property)
Example 1	Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (NAID 404) (Q59405045) → Bureau of Indian Affairs (Q1010563)
Example 2	Records of the U.S. Mint (NAID 433) (Q59405223) → United States Mint (Q1141049)
Example 3	Records of the U.S. Information Agency (Q59405192) → United States Information Agency (Q1754777)
Example 4	Records of the U.S. Senate (NAID 375) (Q59405097) → United States Senate (Q66096)

Motivation

Currently, we lack a property that would allow us to add "creator" in the archival sense. To be clear, I am talking about creator (Q59275219), and not creator (Q2500638), which is the concept the current property creator (P170) refers to. The distinction is that the common understanding of "creator" is about who/what produced something. In archival science, by contrast, "creator" refers to who/what was responsible for a collection of archival materials being produced, gathered, used, etc. In an archival description, therefore, listing a person or organization as a "creator" does not typically imply they physically made it in the same way we mean if we use the current property.

For example, consider a letter sent to the a government agency, which is now in the holdings of the US National Archives. The "creator" would be listed as the agency, as it comes from their records, even though it did not write the letter. The writer, if known, would be listed as a "contributor" (with "role" given as author), if they are described. This is not just a NARA practice. Here is a similar situation in the California State Archives: this document is a trademark filing which contains images and text produced by the applicant—"creator" is listed as "California Secretary of State's Office" (the recipient agency, not the applicant), and the applicant is listed as contributor, "Folger, Schilling and Co."

I would like to be able to add this type of "creator" data to Wikidata. Dominic (talk) 18:34, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Comment Given we already have creator (P170) you are going to need to provide a different label for this property to avoid confusion. I don't know if "archival creator" is right, but something distinctive enough to be clear what your meaning is. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:16, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
  • @ArthurPSmith: Understood. "creator" is the correct name for this concept in the discipline, so I wasn't sure if that would require disambiguation or not. If so, I would suggest "collection creator," though that makes me a little uncomfortable since it's not the technical term. But I think it's an accurate description. Dominic (talk) 20:19, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
•  Support But: agree with ArthurPSmith's comment above, that we need to give it a different primary label here on Wikidata - otherwise people here will certainly mix both up. In order to further clarify the link with archival description: can you figure out to which metadata fields in EAD, ISAD(G) and perhaps other archival description schemes this corresponds? It would perhaps make sense to point to their URIs via equivalent property (P1628), just like the current creator (P170) points to equivalent properties in schema.org and others. Spinster [[User talk:Spinster|💬 ] 11113, 8 December 2018 (UTC))
•  Comment there was some discussion about this at Topic:Umz0wazbjtf7mwv7. -- [User talkkJura11Juraa] 06618, 10 December 2018 (UTC))
•  Comment There is a Wikidata Projet Archival Description where we try to find a way to describe archival element in Wikidata. Any help is welcome..--[Userr2le2immbdcc2le2immbdcc] (([User talkk2le2immbdcc|span classs=signatureetalkk">{inttTalkpagelinktextt}}<spann>]) 06601, 11 December 2018 (UTC))
•  Support Agree because is one of the 6 mandatory elements of the standard ISAD(G))..--[Userr2le2immbdcc2le2immbdcc] (([User talkk2le2immbdcc|span classs=signatureetalkk">{inttTalkpagelinktextt}}<spann>]) 06605, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

@Dominic, ArthurPSmith:  Done: collection creator (P6241). − Pintoch (talk) 14:26, 13 December 2018 (UTC)