Wikidata:WikiProject Narration/Questions

General

Folktales Taskforce

Vocabulary

Open Questions

Open Questions

narrator (P2438)

narrator (P2438) is currently used for characters, actors and types of narrator. Maybe it would be better to have an own property for types of narrators.

Time

How to indicate the order of certain events

• in the chronology of a certain storyworld
• in the narration (the order in which they are narrated)

The first point is a lesser problem if the story is roughly set in our time line and there is an indication of dates (then one can simply use start time (P580), end time (P582) etc). time index (P4895) can be used to indicate time if there is a fictional system of time measurement (e.g. stardate (Q1262613)).

The second point could be solved by being able to refer to certain passages of a work. time index (P4895) could be used for that in statements about the work (e.g. its geographic setting). It seems difficult to use in statements about fictional entities, as an entity can appear in several works and it remains unclear which one is meant (maybe one could combine both time index (P4895) and present in work (P1441) as qualifiers).

Narrative techniques and plot devices

Should there be an own property to indicate the narrative techniques used in a work or is uses (P2283) sufficient?

Characters appearing in multiple works (adaptations, spin-offs) with different characteristics

Currently there are two approaches how to deal with characters appearing in different works in which they may have different characteristics: 1) Qualify the diverging statements with applies to work (P10663) and 2) create a new item for character appearances, linking the character versions via based on (P144) and said to be the same as (P460). An example for the first approach would be Jhil (Q64141306), one for the second approach would be Count Pyotr (Pierre) Bezukhov (Q55033135).

One challenge is to be still able to query for works based on events that happened there or the properties of their characters: If a character died of tuberculosis in one work it appears in but not in all, it should be possible to retrieve only the work in which the character appears and dies of tuberculosis.

The second approach may deal with this challenge generally fine, but it may involve the creation of a lot of characters with possible duplicate or missing information. There may be still the need to qualify statements with applies to work (P10663) in case of characters appearing in multiple works set in the same universe.

The first approach could work following these rules:

• Every statement that is not true for all works in which the character appears should be qualified via applies to work (P10663), listing all the works in which this statement is true.
• Statements that are true in all works should not be qualified.

Now, to retrieve all works in which a character dies of tuberculosis one would just need to query for all works with characters that a) have a statement cause of death (P509) tuberculosis (Q12204) without a applies to work (P10663) qualifier and b) have a statement cause of death (P509) tuberculosis (Q12204) qualified with applies to work (P10663) <work>.