Wikidata:Property proposal/maintains consistent linking to

maintains consistent linking to

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Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Generic

Motivation

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Databases often link to other databases (as we know well on Wikidata ;-). This property would allow to record (and visualize) that linkage. It would also likely reveal the value brought by Wikidata which links to 'all' of them − establishing pathways that do not exist at the moment, and bridging 'islands'.

It would also enable to see pathways for chaining alignments: for example, Deku Deals (Q90278035)Metacritic (Q150248)GameFAQs (Q693757) − by working on Deku Deals, we can find our way to GameFAQs even though there is no direct link.

My own objective is part of Wikiproject Video games − we link to a lot of external databases, and I am interested in modeling the databases themselves − but the concept is applicable to any domain (as shown in the examples).

On Virtual International Authority File (Q54919), I see that uses (P2283) in a similar fashion but the intent is unclear − does it mean that VIAF merely links to BnF authorities (Q19938912) (ie, records the BnF id as a field), or does it use as a data source?

Happy to take suggestions on the wording of the label/description. This idea started as “links to” and was refined to be less vague. The “consistent” part aims to make it clear that this is not about "ad-hoc" linking (a few records of Database A happens to link to Database B, out of thousands of records → not in scope). I think of it as “does this database has a field storing the identifier/link to this other database”. I also thought of something like "consistently records reference to” (which has the advantage of not excluding unlinked references, or references to offline resources) or “has field for” (which sounds a bit too database-y lingo to my taste)

Jean-Fred (talk) 12:58, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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@Jean-Frédéric, ArthurPSmith, PKM, Hannes Röst:   Done maintains linking to (P10568) Pamputt (talk) 16:51, 4 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]