Topic on User talk:Solidest

I noticed you created items for empty category redirects, such as this one. Coincidentally, this category had a corresponding Commons category, so it's useful, however, maybe there are other categories created by accident.

Hi, thanks for reporting this. And yes, I usually filter them out. But I think I forgot to do that in the very first batches. I've rechecked all the batches now and it's 182 redirects out of 28289 new category items summary. I've already replaced their P31 to Wikimedia redirect category (Q114901426), but I'm not sure about the policy regarding them - can't find any direct restrictions about them on WD. So not sure if I should request them for deletion or not.

And out of 182 items, only 8 are soft redirect that are supposed to be empty.

• Category:Times Group people (Q125070952)
• Category:Snapchat (Q125070129)
• Category:Redirects from molecular formulas (Q125069686)
• Category:Non-practicing entities (Q125068687)
• Category:Metaphysical libertarianism (Q125068126)
• Category:Judaism in Copenhagen (Q125067247)
• Category:Gender identity flags (Q125065478)
• Category:Battle Vixens (Q125062742)

The other 174 (like Category:Blade Runner (franchise) character redirects to lists (Q125062869)) contain redirect-articles.

So I found a policy that says soft redirects should be deleted: WD:N/EC. But it turned out that there are already about 2k such redirects on WD. So I created a special type Wikimedia soft redirect category (Q125101059) for them (and filled all such cases from enwiki with it), in which I specified that all these cases should be either merged or nominated for deletion. I also created separate Wikimedia category of redirects (Q125101257), which are essentially administrative categories and not explicitly forbidden on WD.

Should a data item be marked as a soft redirect category if it's a soft redirect only on the English Wikipedia, and not on other projects? I think that's incorrect. If you want to tag the en.WP categories this way, you should first split them off as separate data items from anything they are linked to.

I think this is correct, as it displays an overlap of two types of categories, one of which is not allowed to be used on WD. This just indicates the items where separation work needs to be done.

Adding a statement that also has to be cleaned up is a step in the wrong direction.

Wikimedia duplicated page (Q17362920) or conflation (Q14946528) (which is also widely used in p31) should also be cleaned up wherever they are used. Treat it the same way.

Except that Wikimedia duplicated page (Q17362920) appears on an item that will go away. Items doubly tagged as a Category and a Category soft redirect does not indicate where the problem is, or which project's categories are at issue. It is better practice to simply delink than to add one more thing to be cleaned up.

I've been thinking that since the only problem is that these categories themselves don't give notability. But at the same time categories from other projects provide it, and accordingly these links do not need to be fixed and removed from these items. Would it be a better solution if I add the qualifier "applies to part (P518): English Wikipedia" to all such cases? (or maybe there are other similar and more suitable properties?)

No. It would be better to delink the problematic category and/or move it to a new item. "applies to part" isn't suitable for use with instance of (P31)

And on what basis are they better delinked if they are mostly in the right place? Like I said, their whole problematic thing is that they give no notability if they are set alone and there is nothing else besides them. If other links provided notability, it is not forbidden by policy to add such soft redirects. And what you say about moving them into separate items is literally not allowed by policy according to the rule I listed above.

They are not "mostly in the right place" because they are not categories.

Fair enough. But from the other hand, they are categories (see names and a text in the templates), but just not a typical ones and are probably an overlapping thing with Wikidata:Sitelinks to redirects. Have there been any such discussions on WD forums before? I think it just doesn't get into policy yet (besides notability thing) and our opposing views on this may be both right or wrong.

The central problem is that it's tagging the data item as an "instance of" for something that only one of the linked items satisfies the statement. It would be like tagging every data item that has a French-language page as an instance of the French language.

This is how internal technical identifiers that report (possible) errors work. Wikimedia hasn't come up with a better way to do this (although there are tons of suggestions on Phabricator, like adding a category specific badge next to "intentional sitelink to redirect"). Is it worth hiding it because it doesn't look clean? I'm not sure and imo it's better to clean them up with fixing the error it describes (again, the same way as "duplicate"/"conflation" items do).

Actually I was going to remove this item from cases where there are more than 3 links. But you changed my mind that in these cases links should be removed too, and now I think to leave it as it is. The wikidata policy does not clarify these cases, and on wikipedia such connections seem to be made deliberately and so bulk removal of such links is not an option. So leaving it to fix each case individually seems optimal to me.

When I was thinking of adding this statement next to already set "Wikimedia category" I looked at these stats: https://w.wiki/9Yb7

• 1 enwiki category only: 1409
• 2 interlang categories: 1537
• 3 interlang categories: 450
• 4 and more: 950

Most of these cases are ambiguous. In 2 and 3, there are cases where other languages have redirects set up too (or sometimes these are empty categories). And I think it's more useful to indicate them, as it affects policy, than to pretend it isn't there.