Talk:Q42

Autodescription — Douglas Adams (Q42)

description: British science fiction writer and humorist (1952–2001)

Useful links:

• Pretty display of data  (with Wikidata:Reasonator)

• Pretty display of data  (with Wikidata:Sqid)

• View it! – Images depicting the item on Commons

• Scholia

• Report on constraint conformation of “Douglas Adams” claims and statements. Constraints report for items data

• Number of statements about Douglas Adams by property (query)

• All claims about Douglas Adams (query)

• List of items with same label (query)

• List of lexemes with sense Douglas Adams (query)

Generic queries for musicians

This section is generated with {{Generic queries for musicians}}

• List of musical works interpreted by Douglas Adams (query)
• List of works interpreted by Douglas Adams, ordered by number of sitelinks (query)
• Number of musical works interpreted by Douglas Adams by genre (query) – List of musical works interpreted by Douglas Adams with genre (query)
• See also: WikiProject Music

Generic queries for authors

This section is generated with {{Generic queries for authors}}.

• List of works written by Douglas Adams (query)
• List of works authored by Douglas Adams, ordered by sitelinks (query)
• List of works written by Douglas Adams with instance of property (query)
• List of written works he/she has authored with genre property (query)
• Timeline of Douglas Adams (query)
• Narrative location of works written by Douglas Adams (query)
• Map of narrative location of works written by Douglas Adams (query)
• List of co-authors, sorted by number of collaborations (query)
• Graph of co-authors (query)
• See also : Synia#author : Douglas Adams

See also

• This documentation is generated using {{Item documentation}}.

Coincidence?

So how did the number "42" get associated with Douglas Adams on Wikidata? Luck, or did it involve some careful planning? Or will the universe end & be replaced with something even less comprehensible if someone reveals the answer? -- Llywrch (talk) 08:39, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Early planning, just as "Q1" for the Universe, "Q2" for Earth and "Q13" for fear of the number 13. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q42&oldid=112 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/127.0.0.1?offset=2013 ToBeFree (talk) 21:26, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

@ToBeFree, so why is this? WikiMacaroons (talk) 10:04, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi WikiMacaroons, I'm not sure how the question refers to the previous messages, or why any explanation from my side on this Wikidata talk page is needed. Please see the English Wikipedia's deletion policy if something is unclear about it, and feel free to ask at the English Wikipedia's Teahouse or similar pages if questions remain. Best regards, ToBeFree (talk) 12:13, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Oh, whoops, ToBeFree, you're right. I'm not sure why I left it under this heading. Thanks, WikiMacaroons (talk) 14:39, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Is there some kind of property that can/should be added to items like this where the Q number has been specially chosen for humor? DanielFlaum (talk) 05:08, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Source for 1983 Locus award nomination

Would someone who is able to edit this locked page like to add a reference for the claim that he was nominated for the Locus Award for best science fiction novel in 1983, e.g. to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/award_category_year.cgi?375+1983) or Science Fiction Awards Database (https://www.sfadb.com/Locus_Awards_1983)? Gabrielbodard (talk) 16:44, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Mul vs local language

I have removed all labels that were "Douglas Adams" as that is now reflected through the Mul. This is in line with what was done in English. It can be reverted if necessary, but I think it should be discussed if that's the case.

I myself believe that the deletion is good as it removes redundancy. It can be done in aliases too. I know just one item doesn't change a lot but if it is done in more and more items, we will have a smaller size Wikidata with the same amount of information. Egezort (talk) 19:36, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Even if the name matches with Douglas Adams in a given language, it still makes sense to fill the label. Someone came here (hopefully not a bot) and concluded that name should be written like this, and not Duglass Adamss, for example. And after your removal this information is lost. I strongly suggest to revert them back. Hwem (talk) 01:15, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello,

I agree that that's loss of information, I had e-mailed a developer (I had participated in an interview about this) about this situation, and suggested that there be a boolean value for "same with mul", as that would use a lot less data than having "Douglas Adams" around a hundred times. I'm still for not reverting the labels, as one of the main points of "mul" is to decrease the amount of data used. (I know that this one item doesn't change much, but it is the model item, and its application guides us on what to do, which is how we'll have less redundant data)

With all this said, if you know some people who you would want to join this discussion, feel free to tag them, and after some discussion, I will revert them if we decide so. Thank you for your input, I appreciate it as I myself am also undecided on this. Egezort (talk) 03:55, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

it still makes sense to fill the label – no, labels/aliases and descriptions are not meant for such use. If someone put some effort into checking the correctness of a label or alias, that effort was wasted the moment that work was posted solely as a label or alias (because it is now impossible to check or reproduce that effort as labels and aliases cannot be annotated) and not as a proper statement. There is actually an example of this on the mul talk page, which I think concerns the Welsh language, if I remember correctly. In all this discussions about mul, it is constantly forgotten that labels and aliases are intended only for use for Wikidata purposes (mainly: disambiguation and searching) and all knowledge contributed to Wikidata by users (including names) should be put in statements. Wostr (talk) 17:18, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Until names in different languages are fully supported (and actually used) as statements, labels have to be used outside of Wikidata. And they are widely used (literally all the time in other Wikimedia projects). For huge number of items, only labels allow to distinguish them for other items, and it doesn't matter, if you access them through web interface or not. Hwem (talk) 17:47, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Crosspost my previous reply at Help talk:Default values for labels and aliases: Adding a boolean to indicate that a label is the same as mul in fact does not reduce the amount of data compared with just adding the same label for all languages. Before we have the JSON "labels":{"en":{"language":"en","value":"Douglas Adams"},"en-gb":{"language":"en-gb","value":"Douglas Adams"}}. With mul we have "labels":{"mul":{"language":"mul","value":"Douglas Adams"}}, the shortest. But adding a boolean we will get "labels":{"mul":{"language":"mul","value":"Douglas Adams","sameAsMul":"false"},"en":{"language":"en","value":"","sameAsMul":"true"},"en-gb":{"language":"en-gb","value":"","sameAsMul":"true"}} which is in fact much longer. This information is also useless for data reusers outside of Wikidata contributors. The users don’t care about whether the term "Douglas Adams" in that Wikimedia Commons infobox is "en" or "mul", and they also don’t care whether "en" label is confirmed to be the same as "mul" label or not. So I completely reject this idea. Midleading (talk) 08:05, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Another problem is when you request "en" label by API or WDQS, the expected behaviour of your code is to get the English label, if it should be there. Here is how removing labels actually break things a little bit:

SELECT * {
  {
    SELECT * {
      ?item wdt:P569 "+1952-03-11T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime .
    } LIMIT 100
  }
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,en,de,fr,ja,es,ru,pt,it,zh,fa,ar,pl,nl,uk,tr,id,he,cs,sv,hu,fi,vi,ko,el,hi,bn,no,ca,ro,th,da,sr,bg,az,ms,et,uz,hr,sk,eu,hy,sl,lt,eo,ta,kk,lv,be,kn,sq,ur,mk" .
    ?item rdfs:label ?label . ?item schema:description ?description
  }
}

Try it!

This query is automatically generated by EasyQuery gadget (by one click from Q42 page). And Douglas Adams's name is suddenly in Japanese. You can fix it by adding mul in your query every time when you use the gadget, but it can affect how other items are shown. And where mul should be placed, right after English, or maybe after French? Now imagine large project with lots of code that uses wikidata labels. Hwem (talk) 07:57, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes these are indeed important issues... I would assume mul should be placed at the very beginning for these. Although this is a type of change that I assume we must get used to. Things seem to be correct when mul is at the very beginning. I have mentioned this in Help_talk:Default_values_for_labels_and_aliases#Practical_results_of_removing_non-mul_labels, let's wait for something from either there or here. If no response comes in some time, I'll re-add everything I removed. Egezort (talk) 08:25, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Why noy fix that gadget instead? Midleading (talk) 05:01, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

@Egezort I've restored English label. It's an English writer after all. There is no deletion policy, and guidelines for mul usage for people are not developed yet. Also, I suggest WD:MUL for discussions on this matter. Podbrushkin (talk) 16:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

@Podbrushkin, I'm okay with this. There may be some merit in keeping the label in the "original" or the "most relevant" language. Thanks! Egezort (talk) 16:43, 12 March 2025 (UTC)