User talk:Pi.1415926535

Welcome to Wikidata, Pi.1415926535!

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Best regards! Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 03:56, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Capitalization

Hello, Pi.1415926535. I've noticed that you capitalize the first letter in descriptions ([1], [2] ). Please get acquainted with Help:Description#Capitalization and Help:Label#Capitalization: "Labels [and descriptions] begin with a lowercase letter except for when uppercase is normally required or expected."

Also, take a note that Help:Description#Capitalization is different from the English Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Short description#Formatting (WP:SDFORMAT), which encourages to "start with a capital letter".--Russian Rocky (talk) 16:53, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@Russian Rocky: Thanks for the note - I'll try to remember that from now on. Any idea how Wikidata and enwiki ended up with incompatible capitalization schemes? Pi.1415926535 (talk) 17:12, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

No problem. If I remember correctly, "short descriptions" were introduced on the English Wikipedia as a substitute for Wikidata's descriptions due to some vandalism concerns on Wikidata. In a result, the English Wikipedia made its own "short descriptions" that aren't interchangeable with Wikidata's descriptions. Unfortunately, it has become a constant problem for both projects.--Russian Rocky (talk) 18:20, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Reverts to Lorton and Palo Alto train station labels

Hi Pi.1415926535, I noticed you had reverted my changes, restoring "station" to the end of the labels of these two train stations. It seems to me that "station" is disambiguation information that belongs in the description, not the label. What was the reason behind these reverts? Clorox (talk) 18:27, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Clorox: Sorry, I posted on your talk page before I saw you'd posted here. Established naming conventions on other wikis, particularly enwiki, is to include "station" in the name. That both matches common colloquial usage and makes the identity of the item more intuitively clear. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 18:37, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not Wikidata. Naming conventions are not always the same. According to Help:Label, the "Wikimedia page title may give orientation", but Wikipedia page titles often include disambiguation information that doesn't belong in a Wikidata label. I certainly wouldn't expect to see a map with every train station labeled "XYZ station". If clarity of the item's identity is an issue, that's what the description is for. Clorox (talk) 18:44, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

@Clorox: This is a massive change that you're making based on personal opinions. That quote doesn't give any justification for changing thousands of pages, nor for continuing after someone has objected. It makes Wikidata less usable by having ambiguous page titles, while not providing any benefit whatsoever. Please stop the change, revert to the previous versions, and seek consensus before making potential disruptive mass changes. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 19:08, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

I've stopped for now. I still don't think ambiguous "page titles" (labels?) are a sufficient rationale to retain disambiguation info in labels. As you're probably aware, items with ambiguous labels are quite common, and they have descriptions that can hold as much disambiguation info as necessary.

One rather obvious benefit of this change you may have overlooked is that labels without "station" match what is actually indicated on running-in boards and signs at the stations, as well as how they are typically presented on maps and in data formats like GTFS. Wikidata is sort of an outlier in this regard, for no clear reason. Including the word "station" in the name means data consumers must do some string manipulation to remove it before presenting it, making Wikidata a significantly less helpful resource to anyone working with train station data.

Regardless, this talk page probably isn't the best place to hash out this issue and form community consensus. Where would be the best place for that discussion? Clorox (talk) 19:29, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata:Project chat would probably be the best location. I would also leave a note at en:Wikipedia talk:Wikiproject Trains to get more opinions familiar with the specific topic area, since that's where the vast majority of English discussion about station names has taken place.

In my experience writing about railroads, "XXX station" (or "XXX railway station" in many Commonwealth countries, etc) is treated as the full name of the station, while "XXX" is shorthand. That means that "station" should be included in the primary name, rather than being treated as a disambiguator.

I am much more concerned about internal consistency (having enwiki article names, Commons category names, and Wikidata names) match, and having Wikidata items be human readable, than I am about exact matching with external sites. Anyone doing large matches to external data sets:

• Can easily perform that string manipulation in their process if needed, likely with just a few characters of code
• Are likely to be matching on more consistent identifiers like the GTFS stop_id than on the name alone, in large part because:
• Many agencies are extremely inconsistent about their station names, and stations served by multiple agencies are often even worse - see Q800386 for a typical example.

Pi.1415926535 (talk) 21:26, 5 April 2023 (UTC)