Game proposal: Nationality guessing

[Luc Béasse]

Proposal 2: infer nationality from place of birth

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For people with place of birth set, get the country of that place. The person is probably of that nationality.

Might need a custom game per nationality. In the query, I further restricted by date of birth, since I am not sure nationality is a valid concept too far in the past.

[Magnus Manske]

Done!

http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/#mode=nationality

[Giso Broman]

I haven’t found any guidance on the Wikidata site about how to determine what constitutes a person’s nationality. There must be some kind of decision-making hierarchy or set of rules. So far I have looked at only a dozen articles or so and already I have run across:

• someone who born and died in a city that was part of Russia during their lifetime, but is in Ukraine today,

• someone described in their article as Bengali who lived in both India and Bangladesh.

These simple examples are illustrative of the complexity the concept of nationality. I would agree with Luc Béasse when he said in the original proposal, “I am not sure nationality is a valid concept to[o] far in the past”. Even going back only as far as the 19th century, our current geography becomes very problematic.

I have really enjoyed these games, and especially like how they have helped to make Wikidata more accessible to those of us who haven’t taken the time to learn all of the rules about how the data are created, etc. In cases like this one, however, I worry that a lack of common understanding about how to formulate a consistent decision will lead to a lot of bad data.

Is there some instructional language (or a link) that you could insert to guide people’s thinking about this murky concept of nationality? On a related note, I would suggest a similar note of clarification in the Person game, just to help eliminate the addition of more Groups of People, Fictional Characters, etc.

Thanks for creating this!!

[Magnus Manske]

The game assigns a statement for P27 to the item. There is plenty of discussion on that talk page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P27

I have, consequently, changed all the game labels to "Country of citizenship".

Finally, the candidate items have the original time constraint from Luc, that is, born in or after 1750.

[Luc Béasse]

Well, my 1750 constraint was for French people, since this is my very personal estimation of the most certain time when France became a stable entity corresponding to what we call today a country. But I am really, really not an historian.

I guess that ideally, that time limit should be country dependent. Playing the game, I was offered a 19th century person born in today's Ireland. Is his country of nationality the "Republic of Ireland"? I guess not, since AFAIK the Republic of Ireland was founded in the 1920's.

[Giso Broman]

Saying this to myself, as a reminder…

As long as the majority of the people who play the game are somewhat like-minded about the complexity of these issues, it will probably work itself out. “Perfect” metadata is a pretty lofty goal!

[Waldir Pimenta]

Well, each country does have their founding date in wikidata itself, right? https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P571 (Date of foundation or creation) should provide this information, and then we could simply compare the country's founding date with the person's birth date. However, I'm not sure that's the correct property to use, e.g. for Germany it's set to 18 January 1871! An alternative would be to search for a date qualifier for the "instance of" --> (country/sovereign state/republic), but e.g. Germany has no qualifier for any of these. Eventually we could have a hardcoded value in the game's own source code (1750 for France, 1990 for Germany(?), etc.). It is indeed a hard problem...