Wikidata:Property proposal/had part

had part edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

Not done

Represents	related to P527 (has part), but describing a former relationship that no longer exists
Data type	Item
Domain	Q36704, Q11036
Allowed values	relevant items, perons etc.
Allowed units	N/A
Example	Yugoslavia (Q36704) → Montenegro - The Rolling Stones (Q11036) → Brian Jones
Source	external reference URL, Wikipedia list article
Planned use	Eg. add fomer band members (see above). To be used in Wikpedia infoboxes for listing former members of musical ensembles.
Expected completeness	eventually complete (Q21873974)
See also	P527, P361

Motivation

It's hard to keep some Wikipedia infoboxes updated due to the lack of former "parts", such as band members that have quit or died, or generally relationships of the kind described by P527 (has part) that are no longer extant. Ideally, P361 (part of) would also be supplemented by a new property, such as "was part of". Asav (talk) 10:30, 20 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Oppose. Wikidata can deal with this without a dedicated property, see Evolving knowledge. author TomT0m / talk page 12:28, 20 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There's a purely practical side to this. First of all, what you're suggesting isn't implemented at all, and there is no realistic possibility that it will be in the foreseeable future. And even if it were to be implemented, that would not in any way impair a property named "had part".

Furthermore, the extant property has part is an obvious misnomer, as eg. former members of bands are no longer parts of that band. A property had part would alleviate that problem, and moving entries from one property to another is relatively simple as compared to your suggestion.

Thirdly, at least the Norwegian Wikipedia edition (where I'm mostly active) is increasingly reliant in Wikidata for its infoboxes. That will be obviously the case for other editions in the near future. As of today, the has part property is confusing and misleading and cannot be used in infoboxes. That makes any ongoing transition unnecessarily hard.

Lastly, even if your suggestion were implemented (which would take an anormous amount of work as compared to simply adding a property), it would have to be followed up by complicated reprogramming in infoboxes and modules, which is far from a trivial task for non-programmers. There is little or no chance that this will actually be done.

In short, this proposal is an easy solution to a problem it would be hard to solve in any other way. Asav (talk) 10:45, 23 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It’s not « my suggestion », it’s the initial dev team plan about Wikidata. @Lea Lacroix (WMDE): can you confirm ? author TomT0m / talk page 11:04, 23 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose I agree with TomT0m. The qualifier end time (P582) exists for exactly this purpose, to indicate a statement is no longer valid. It should routinely be checked when infoboxes use statements. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:34, 23 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose in addition to end time (P582) you can use ranks, i.e. setting the current value to preferred. Canonical queries are only returning values with the highest rank thus you can even ignore qualifiers in queries and still get the expected result. --Pasleim (talk) 12:44, 24 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose per Arthur and Pasleim. Mahir256 (talk) 16:21, 26 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Asav: I am marking this as Not done per the comments above. If you need help with implementing the qualifier-based solution in a particular infobox, Wikidata:Project chat should help. Note that there is also an ongoing consultation about the Lua functions to query Wikidata: Wikidata:New_convenience_functions_for_Lua, so if you are not happy with the current ones feel free to explain it there (linking to this proposal if necessary). − Pintoch (talk) 08:22, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]