Wikidata:Property proposal/Matrix room (2)

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Matrix room

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Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control

   Done: Matrix room ID (P11478) (Talk and documentation)
DescriptionName of Matrix (Q22906785) room the entity is using.
Data typeExternal identifier
Allowed valuesstrings in the form of #somewhere:example.org (#<room name>:<domain>) no longer than 255 characters (spec)
Example 1Wikimedia movement (Q3568028)#wikimedia-space:matrix.org
Example 2Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe (Q114309441)#wikimedia-cee:matrix.org
Example 3Matrix (Q22906785)#matrix:matrix.org
Example 4for more examples see this query
Implied notabilityWikidata property for an identifier that does not imply notability (Q62589320)
Formatter URLhttps://matrix.to/#/$1
See alsoIRC channel URL (P1613), Discord server numeric ID (P9345), X username (P2002), Facebook username (P2013) etc

Motivation

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Similar to IRC channel URL (P1613) - Matrix is slowly replacing IRC as FLOSS discussion infrastructure. Useful for generating contact sections. Could be represented with IM channel URL (P8009) and a qualifier, but that seems needlessly complex and hard to use.

2nd nomination, sort of. Originally proposed as Matrix channel but as pointed out below "room" makes more sense; I only noticed while renaming that Wikidata:Property proposal/Matrix room already exists.

Some thoughts:

  • Could be an URL instead of an identifier, see URI spec. Not sure which is better. (Although note that a matrix: URI can represent a number of other things than a room, e.g. a user.)
  • Technically, Matrix has room IDs and room aliases. Room IDs are random strings (used to avoid collisions) and not terribly useful. Room aliases are non-unique - a room can have many names and technically there isn't any "primary" name. But in practice / socially there always is (the one that gets linked from the project homepage etc) so I think making room name (and not ID) into a property is reasonable.
  • There is Wikidata:Property proposal/Matrix space already. Depending on how you look at it, spaces are a subset of rooms (room is a fundamental building block in Matrix, kind of like directories in a file system, and gets used under the hood for a bunch of thing the end user would not think of as rooms – so spaces are implamented as a special type of room), or something entirely different (from the user POV, they are a tagging system for grouping rooms belonging to the same community). So not sure if this proposal would obsolete that one or not. In any case, I think rooms are more often relevant to a Wikidata entity than spaces.
  • The URL formatter would either be matrix:r/$1 but with the first character of $1 sliced off (e.g. matrix:r/somewhere:example.org - see spec) or https://matrix.to/#/$1 but with $1 urlencoded (e.g. https://matrix.to/#/%23somewhere%3Aexample.org - see spec). I imagine that wouldn't work out of the box. A third possibility would be https://app.element.io/#/room/$1 which opens the room in a hosted instance of Element, the most popular Matrix client – that works without any manipulation of the identifier, but the URL is less generic and not useful to people using other clients or other Element service providers.

-- Tgr (talk) 18:20, 30 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

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@Tgr, Laftp0, Push-f, Waldyrious, 1-Byte, Haansn08:@快乐的老鼠宝宝, MTRNord, SlowByte, Dandellion Dali99: ✓ Done as Matrix room ID (P11478). I added some examples from the first proposal. I listed https://matrix.org/ as source website, which might be doubtful. Feel free to correct that. Lymantria (talk) 09:43, 7 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! --Push-f (talk) 15:24, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Dandellion Dali99: I see that you qualified a bunch of statements with this new property with instance of (P31)Matrix room (Q114785432) or instance of (P31)Matrix Space (Q116081600). I don't think P31 should be used as a qualifier. I think it would make more sense to use subject has role (P2868). --Push-f (talk) 15:29, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think we need to qualify matrix rooms at all. There's an argument to be had over whether spaces should be represented with this property and a qualifier (from an UX point of view, it's a quite distinct concept; at the technical level, they are implemented as a special kind of room, so e.g. the formatter URL will work) or a dedicated property, but rooms being rooms should go without saying. Tgr (talk) 22:11, 8 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    My logic here is that if you do qualify spaces. e.g. for Q22906785 separating #matrix:matrix.org from #community:matrix.org, you'd have to also specify chat rooms. How else would you separate "missing data" and "chat room"?
    It also wouldn't sit right for me to have "matrix room" just mean chat, matrix is very explicit about not being an exclusively chat based protocol. Would a Thirdroom[1] world be just modeled as a chat room? What about rooms specifically for storing sticker packs? Or cereuleans microblogging feeds. There are matrix clients using rooms to share pdf annotations, synchronize collaborative documents and whiteboards. Many of these might not be super useful for most items on wikidata, but I still think we should be accurate and open for different forms of rooms being adopted.
    Whether or not that means we make a new property for each and one of them, qualify the matrix rooms with types like Q116081600 and matrix room (or maybe matrix chat or just chat would be more preferable), or something else entirely I'm not sure what's best. But if we are limiting this property to just chat rooms I think this property should be named something like matrix chat room instead at least Dandellion Dali99 (talk) 03:26, 9 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]