Conflations, "duplicates" and split candidates
Language: English

On Wikidata, some items are not as precise as they could be, but perhaps sometimes just so precise as they need to be. In this collaborative roundtable, we will discuss when it is appropriate to have multiple items for related concepts and when it is okay to conflate them in one.


Over the years, we have found that some real-world phenomena are not as clear to regular people as what Wikidata could store. A common example is a museum, where the building it is in often is conflated with the organization (often the legal entity) operating the museum. Sometimes this makes sense, but sometimes it could also lead to odd property combinations, for example that something both has the property "floors above ground" and "total revenue". Another example is a journal publisher with only one journal. Some users have argued that there is no value to creating one of each of these items, whereas others argue that this is needed to keep the data model clean and the results from queries predictable. In this session, we will discuss a number of common instances of this to see what advantages and disadvantages each of these ways of modeling has, and also try to draw some general conclusions that could be applicable to other similar occurrences.


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Collaboration

How does your session relate to the event themes: Collaboration of the Open?*

The session is in itself a collaboration to try to find common ground and make future on-wiki discussions easier.

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This session is for an experienced audience

How do you plan to deliver this session?*

Onsite in Katowice