Wikidata talk:WikiProject Alphabet

Aliases to add to letters

• Uppercase and lowercase forms.
• Letter names. Some lists of these can be found on Wiktionary: wikt:Template:list:Latin script letter names/en, Latin script letter names in English (with links to names in other languages), wikt:Template:list:Hebrew script letter names/en, Hebrew's in English, wikt:Template:list:Cyrillic script letter names/ru, Cyrillic's in Russian, wikt:Template:list:Greek script letter names/es, Greek's in Spanish...

--Yair rand (talk) 00:00, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Hebrew letters

Problem with the Hebrew letters: The English Wikipedia and certain other Wikipedias do not have articles specifically about any of the Hebrew letters, but some do, so a lot of the interwikis are just incorrect... --Yair rand (talk) 08:58, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Basic structure for letters

I guess, it is the following:

• instance of (P31) letter (Q9788)
• part of (P361) to something which is instance of (P31) alphabet (Q9779) (could be several)
• follows (P155) and followed by (P156) to another letter - and I guess we should somehow add those alphabets where this is the case?
• maybe something like based on (P144) to something which is likely also a letter but does not have to be

If there is an agreement, give a +1 here and we can add it to the project page. --Denny (talk) 21:19, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Denny, I think subclass of should be used instead of instance of in the above proposal. This would help ensure the basic structure for letters avoids conflating ontological levels. An instance of alphabet should never be a subclass of alphabet; the same holds for letters. For example, hierarchies like the following should be avoided:

• English alphabet instance of alphabet
• English alphabet subclass of Latin alphabet
• Latin alphabet instance of alphabet
• (:. English alphabet instance of alphabet, and English alphabet subclass of alphabet)

The last point there, which is entailed by the three preceding points, is an example of conflating ontological levels. See the last "Porsche Carrera" example in e.g. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2014-September/004651.html for more discussion of why that is a bad idea.

For context, the claim "English alphabet subclass of Latin alphabet" comes from the article on English alphabet, which states in the lead sentence "The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet". The natural language phrase is a is ambiguous, but most ontologies that consider is_a map it to subclass of; see e.g. http://genomebiology.com/2005/6/5/r46.

Using subclass of not only helps avoid conflating ontological levels, but also builds upon precedent in existing linguistic ontologies, which use subclass of for such things, as described in e.g. A Linguistic Ontology for the Semantic Web ("The resulting partial taxonomy is shown in Figure 1 (Note: tabs represent the subclass relation)"). Consider also how OntoWordNet models letters like the Greek letter sigma and the Hebrew letter gimel as classes in their OWL ontology, OWN.owl. Notably, WordNet also considers languages like Italian to be classes, as explained in WordNet Nouns: Classes and Instances. All of these indicate that external ontologies heavily favor classifying these kinds of linguistic entities via subclass of, not instance of. Emw (talk) 21:37, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

@Emw: Do you mean only in the second claim (i.e. part of (P361) to something which is instance of (P31) alphabet (Q9779)), or also in the first claim (i.e. instance of (P31) letter (Q9788))? I would disagree with the latter. I am not sure about the former, but I wanted to ask first, so that I know what we are discussing. --Denny (talk) 17:21, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Denny, sorry for the delayed reply. (For some reason your ping did not appear in my Notifications.)

I mean in both the first and second claims. Let's examine the situation with the second claim. Consider the hypothetical model:

1. Letter A part of English alphabet

2. English alphabet instance of alphabet

3. English alphabet subclass of Latin alphabet

4. Latin alphabet instance of alphabet

Claims 2, 3, and 4 entail that English is both an instance and a subclass precisely the same entity -- alphabet. This conflates ontological levels. An item can of course be both an instance and a class (e.g. 'golden eagle' as an instance of 'species' and a subclass of 'bird'), but being an instance and a class of the same entity is widely considered to be an error. This is directly analogous to your last "Porsche Carrera" example in e.g. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2014-September/004651.html. We could eliminate that ontological problem by classifying these things with subclass of, not instance of, as the reliable sources described in my previous comment do. Emw (talk) 18:23, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

@Emw: What are instances of English alphabet? I am having trouble understanding this. I agree that claim #3 in your model is problematic, and would remove that and replace it with another property (e.g. derived from? I really don't know).

But since you say you also mean the P31 in the first claim: can you explain how a letter would be a subclass of an alphabet? This does seem to me quite unusual. --Denny (talk) 18:38, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Denny, consider what the authors of WordNet say about languages, which are often essentially entwined with alphabets:

Languages posed another problem. For example, are Old Italian, Sardinian, and Tuscan instances of Italian? It was decided that, from an ontological point of view, languages are not instances. Only speech acts are instances.

— George A. Miller and Florentina Hristea, WordNet Nouns: Classes and Instances

We also see that OntoWordNet models letters like the Greek letter sigma and the Hebrew letter gimel as classes in their OWL ontology, OWN.owl. Presumably OntoWordNet would classify the English letter A as a subclass of letter like it does letters in other alphabets. "Types & Tokens: On Abstract Objects" by Wetzel discusses the ontology of letters in greater detail. I have not found any specific discussion of alphabets in Semantic Web or other ontological literature, but it seems very likely that the authors WordNet and ontologists would consider alphabets to be classes as well.

You asked what are instances of English alphabet. Following the logic the authors of WordNet and ontologists apply to languages and letters, I think the following comma-delimited strings would be an instance of the English alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, ABCDEFGHIJKLMnopqrstuvwxyz, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. The strings depicted in this image would also each be an instance of English alphabet, as would the speech act in File:Alphabet.oga.

Regarding claim 3 (English alphabet subclass of Latin alphabet), note that that is a straightforward reading of the subject's description on English Wikipedia: "The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet". Thus I think claims 2 and 4, not claim 3, should be avoided. Also, I don't see how you think I've suggested that a letter would be a subclass of an alphabet. It would not. I agree a letter would part of an alphabet, but I think letters like the Greek letter sigma would be best modeled as subclasses of letter.

The nature of alphabets and other lexical entities as classes can, of course, be paraphrased away with properties like derives from, version of, depicts, manifests, and concretizes. But I have shown that reliable sources in the field refer to very similar things as classes and use subclass of on them, and that everyday speech also construes alphabets as classes. From there I think it follows that things like English alphabet should be classified as a subclass of alphabet, not an instance of it. Emw (talk) 02:51, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I also would like to take this discussion to a wider audience, because we two simply will not agree. For me, English alphabet is an instance of Alphabet, not a subclass. For me, A is an instance of a letter, not a subclass of a letter.

There are several ways to solve the Latin alphabet issue. One might say the English alphabet derives from the Latin alphabet. We also have Latin script (Q8229) as an item, and I am unsure how it fits into the whole discussion. We could also say that Latin alphabet is a subclass of Alphabet (namely those alphabets that use the Latin script?), and English alphabet is an instance of Latin alphabet (and, thus, alphabet). One way or the other, whereas I understand your interpretation of the terms, I cannot see how regarding English alphabet as a class of alphabets is useful for Wikidata and our use cases. --Denny (talk) 15:31, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikimania 2016

Only this week left for comments: Wikidata:Wikimania 2016 (Thank you for translating this message). --Tobias1984 (talk) 12:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

What are the best modelled items for your area of interest?

Hi all

Over the past few months myself and others have been thinking about the best way to help people model subjects consistently on Wikidata and provide new contributors with a simple way to understand how to model content on different subjects. Our first solution is to provide some best practice examples of items for different subjects which we are calling Model items. E.g the item for William Shakespeare (Q692) is a good example to follow for creating items about playwright (Q214917). These model items are linked to from the item for the subject to make them easier to find and we have tried to make simple to understand instructions.

We would like subject matter experts to contribute their best examples of well modelled items. We are asking all the Wikiprojects to share with us the kinds of subjects you most commonly add information about and the best examples you have of this kind of item. We would like to have at least 5 model items for each subject to show the diversity of the subject e.g just having William Shakespeare (Q692) as a model item for playwright (Q214917), while helpful may not provide a good example for people trying to model modern poets from Asia.

You can add model items yourself by using the instructions at Wikidata:Model items. It may be helpful to have a discussion here to collate information first.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 15:08, 17 December 2018 (UTC)