User talk:Daniel Kinzler (WMDE)

 Dear, Welcome to MediaWiki.org !

Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:
 * Landing instructions
 * Project:About
 * How does MediaWiki work?
 * Help:Editing pages
 * Frequently asked questions
 * How to contribute
 * Policies

If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site useful documentation of the MediaWiki software. Thanks, and regards, John Vandenberg (talk) 11:12, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the welcome! I have been around four a while tough :) -- Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) (talk) 21:36, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Data model edit
In a recent series of edits you added to Wikibase/DataModel this sentence:

"The data model is conceptual ('Which information do we have to support?') and does not specify how this data should be represented technically ('Which data structures should the software use?') or syntactically ('How should the data be expressed in a file?')."

But a person or group who wishes to extract data from the database must know what format the data will be in if it is to be used, especially if large quantities of data are being extracted. What document can the users refer to so they will know what the data format is? Jc3s5h (talk) 14:34, 28 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I did not add this sentence. This sentence has been there from the very first revision Markus Krötzsch wrote of this document. In fact, the first revision of this document (on meta.wikimedia.org back then) consisted only of this sentence, see . I did update the yellow box to also state something similar, so it won't be missed so easily when hunting for the juicy bits of the page.
 * The only binding currently documented is JSON. The specification document is maintained along with the program source code for consistency, but there is a copy on this wiki, see Wikibase/Notes/JSON. There are some minor updates pending. If you feel that there is anything missing there, please let me know. I recommend against editing the wiki page, since it's just a copy of the primary document. If you want to submit a patch for json.wiki, please do!
 * Thanks for your input! I hope we can provide documentation for more bindings in the near future, especially PHP and JavaScript. RDF is still too much in flux. I also hope we can make the documents more consistent, and cross-link them better. -- Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) (talk) 21:31, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for making clarifications in this edit. I immediately noticed a questionable phrase 'Years BCE are represented as negative numbers, following the traditional ordering, in which year 0 is undefined, and the year 1 BCE is represented as -0001,...' [emphasis added]. The traditional users of negative years are astronomers, and for them, the year 0 is most certainly defined, that's why they do it! It makes their arithmetic easier. I think a different phrasing is needed. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:22, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Another point is that time zone offsets are currently not in use, which means that in effect, all the times in the database are local times. That's certainly how people have been using it; they read a source that X died in Hawaii on February 12, 1893, and that's what they put in. If you ever wanted to redefine the dates to be UT, you would have to go through the whole database, figure out the location, figure out what the time zone was at the date of the event (don't forget daylight saving time) and add the offset. Some entries won't have enough information to do that. I think your stuck with local time forever. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:36, 11 August 2016 (UTC)