Wikidata:Property proposal/mission statement
mission statement
[edit]Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Organization
| Description | official statement of an organization's purpose |
|---|---|
| Represents | mission statement (Q942830) |
| Data type | Monolingual text |
| Domain | item |
| Example 1 | Creative Commons (Q43449) → Creative Commons develops, supports, and stewards legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation. |
| Example 2 | World Vegetable Center (Q8036391) → Alleviate poverty and malnutrition in the developing world through the increased production and consumption of nutritious, health-promoting vegetables. |
| Example 3 | Halifax Pride (Q17512396) → To provide a pride festival that reflect and celebrates the best of the LGBTQ+ community and culture in Halifax and throughout Nova Scotia. |
| See also | motto text (P1451) |
Motivation
[edit]We currently have a motto text (P1451) property, which was originally defined as "short motivation sentence associated to item (e.g. at the bottom of its coat of arms)," but somewhere along the way an editor changed the property label to include "slogan | mission statement | mission | tagline".
I think mission statement (Q942830) and motto (Q42470) are quite distinct (and not mutually exclusive) concepts that should not be conflated in this way. Probably slogan (Q30515) as well, which more of a marketing concept, but that's not my area of interest. All three of the examples I gave above are mission statements that are currently listed in their items already but using the "motto text" property. Of note, motto text (P1451) includes many organizations, but mostly places, while mission statements are almost exclusively for organizations.
Related: should we create a property for the Vision statement (Q18733426), which often go hand in hand with organizational mission statements? Dominic (talk) 15:57, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
Discussion
[edit]
Comment Note there is a limited length (400 characters?) for string/text properties in Wikidata; I think a lot of these statements (particularly "vision statements") can be much longer than that. I'd be more in favor of finding another place to put these pieces of text (Wikiquote? Commons?) and linking them appropriately. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:40, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
- It's a valid point. I was curious about the character limit and found that it is being increased to 1500 in the near future. I think that will be sufficient for just about any of these, since that is about half a page of text. Does it belong on Wikidata? Certainly, it's a little different, but I think it's one of the more significant pieces of data about an organization, and it would be very useful to be able to do queries such as "list the mission statements of all museums in the United States", something that cannot be done outside of Wikidata. (Possibly relevant to FindingGLAMs.) Dominic (talk) 19:50, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
- Yeah it should now be limited to 1500. --LydiaPintscher (talk) 13:25, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
- It's a valid point. I was curious about the character limit and found that it is being increased to 1500 in the near future. I think that will be sufficient for just about any of these, since that is about half a page of text. Does it belong on Wikidata? Certainly, it's a little different, but I think it's one of the more significant pieces of data about an organization, and it would be very useful to be able to do queries such as "list the mission statements of all museums in the United States", something that cannot be done outside of Wikidata. (Possibly relevant to FindingGLAMs.) Dominic (talk) 19:50, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
Oppose Use the description David (talk) 07:09, 15 November 2018 (UTC)
- The description field of an item isn't the right place for the mission statement. --LydiaPintscher (talk) 13:25, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
Support --LydiaPintscher (talk) 13:25, 21 November 2018 (UTC)- Does this pose a copyright issue? Some mission statements might be long enough to be copyrightable. Even if it doesn't, I think it would be preferable for this kind of thing to wait until we have structured Wikiquote, instead of using the monolingual text datatype. --Yair rand (talk) 05:57, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
- Oppose. --Yair rand (talk) 21:00, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
- @Yair rand: Copyright is a valid concern for some possible uses of this property, including potentially the examples above—which I just took from existing uses of the other property that need to be disambiguated, so I'm not necessarily vouching for them. I am not sure why that would invalidate the need for the property, though. There are still many cases of institutions with unambiguously public domain mission statements, either due to age, simplicity, or government agency (such as US federal agencies) which do not copyright works. Dominic (talk) 15:11, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
- Support John Samuel (talk) 15:06, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
- Oppose this is essentially advertising. NMaia (talk) 05:19, 23 June 2019 (UTC)