Talk:Wikidata/Technical proposal

Microformats

Changes to infoboxes need to be mindful of those that already emit microformats; I'm happy to advise further if and when needed. pigsonthewing 16:58, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Will come back to you. This will be relevant as soon as phase 2 starts. Please ping me again if I do not come back to you! --denny 10:28, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

You should probably use Microdata and not Microformat, as the former is the W3C standardized version. You should also consider RDFa. Check also Schema.org[1] and how they organize reuse. — Jeblad 16:48, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Just to be clear Microdata is not yet a W3C standard, it's in draft form as part of the HTML5 draft. RDFa is a standard as of version 1.0, and RDFa 1.1 is currently a Candidate Recommendation. To the degree that current wikis use Microformat, these should be preserved, but in all cases through an appropriate RDF transformation. Gkellogg (talk) 20:15, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

What are alignments?

Can anybody expain the meaning of the word alignments for me? I'm confused by it when I tried to translate it into Chinese and I cannot find a right Chinese word for it. Many Thanks. --Linforest (talk) 04:34, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

This is about saying that one article is the same as another in another language. Hope this clarified it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:40, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Lydia, Thank you so much! It's an amazing explanation :) Cheers --Linforest (talk) 00:49, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Format to store/retrieve data

I have a little question about data formating for this project. In es.wikipedia we use the format dd/mm/yyyy to represent a date (or dd de mmmm de yyyy) but there's a lot of standard ways to represent a date. How can we store this data? (yes, I consider the ISO standard to store), but a new question appears: how can we use (or reuse) the standard data in local projects?. Consider that the birthday of someone is a date datatype, but the representation depends on locale (es, en, es_AR, tv, etc.). Are we considering a bot (o similar tool) to make the transformation? Superzerocool (talk) 14:22, 2 April 2012 (UTC) (I use the date datatype to give us some example, please consider other data such as numbers or name of US States)

There will be ways to convert data and show it appropriately. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:36, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Woud you mind paraphrasing this sentence for me?

In P2.7 for Phase 2:

...This must consider the issues of protection and protection propagation from the Wikipedias (see also O2.5).

Woud you mind paraphrasing this sentence for me? Thanks. --Linforest (talk) 06:45, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Sure :) This is about protection of pages. Like say a page on the English Wikipedia is protected. We have to think about how this is relevant for Wikidata because worst case the article is protected and the data in it still change constantly because someone is having an edit war in Wikidata.

Thanks so much for working on the translations! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Lydia, many thanks for your timely clarifying and encouraging! Cheers:) --Linforest (talk) 17:28, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Stylistic considerations: bringing in the multilingual communities early?

May I say that this attention to technical planning is the kind of professionalism we've been waiting for in the Wikimedia movement. It's very good work.

Style is so important in the presentation of data, and it varies from language to language, and even within languages. Many Wikimedia projects—particularly the Wikipedias—have editors with expertise in such considerations for their language (some even specialise in numerical style, although I don't). I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to invite them to give input (including negotiating among themselves in a multilingual environment) concerning presentation and formatting on Wikidata, before too much is set in cement.

The proposal for Phase 2 states: "Some data types that are basic but do not fit into linear transformations (like time, space, temperature, and currency) must be appropriately implemented." This is not just a matter of ascertaining basic practices concerning decimal points (0,27 vs 0.27), commas/dots/spaces in long numbers (1 020 600 vs 1.020.000 vs 1,020,000), and whether percentage signs are spaced (as in French) or unspaced (as in English). Do we need a shared understanding about levels of precision? Should the ISO be followed in terms of the leading zero? What is to be done about the matter of US versus SI units? (That was worked through with some difficulty on en.WP, and now functions well enough, but not without a set of rules for managing what is in effect a binary system in the anglosphere.) Same for date formats. Many of these issues could be the subject of regular bot-runs. Tony (talk) 08:17, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes this sounds like something we should talk about. Do you have time for a quick chat on IRC to get this started? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:04, 16 April 2012 (UTC)