Renaming Properties?

From semantic-mediawiki.org
Wait a second. Hold the phone.
I was going to ask about renaming properties; I'm guessing this is not the best idea. But, why not?
Why not just Move a Property page?
But before we get to that...
Let's talk about the contents of Special:Properties page.
on Special:Properties there are:
Orange links
I have no idea what these are. Some are preceded some text, such as, "7 of type", some are followed by a number in parenthesis, while others are followed by a datatype in parenthesis.
Some of these pages exist and some don't.
Has label exists
Has value does not exist
those pages that exist I can Move but I suspect the orange links are errors of some type
Blue Links
These pages exist and, therefore, I can Move them. But I notice a difference between Cover_image and Country. One contains what seems to be automatically inserted text whilst the other does not. Perhaps this is because Properties can be created in at least two ways:
Manually Creating a Property page
Using the Special Page: Create a property from the Special Pages
is there any way to tell how a page was created; is there any way to tell if it was created "manually" or via the Create a property page?
Red links
These pages don't exist and, therefore, cannot be moved.
Perhaps these Properties, I mean these pages, should have been created and should now be created.
So my questions are:
What can I tell by looking @ the Special:Properties page?
Can I rename Properties by moving the page?
Is it a Best Practice to create properties via the Special:CreateProperty?
Is it Best Practice to rename properties?
Is is there any way to tell how a Property was created, viz., via Special:CreateProperty or "manually"?
08:19, 23 October 2012
  • Special:Properties shows you the properties existing in the wiki: special properties (usually only in italics but here additionally in orange to allow better identification), properties with blue links (respective properties were created assigning a datatype and/or providing infos about the property) and properties with red links (no datatype was assigned, thus they will be of type page, and without infos about the property) Note: This special page is kinda broken right now (2012-10-28). I will file a bug for this.
  • I guess you can, but I would not recommend to do it. There have been several mails on the mailing list that report some kind of problem resulting from this. So I recommend creating a new property with the desired name and changing all property assignments from the old to the new property. One may consider using the "Replace Text" extension for this or some bot.
  • Special:CreateProperty is provided by the "Semantic Forms" extension, so if this one was not installed you cannot use is. However, in case this extension was installed I would recommend using it since it helps you doing so.
  • This depends. I am sure that there are cases there you might want to rename a property. However, I would not do this all the time and only after consideration (see above)
  • Yes, Special:CreateProperty adds a standardised message: Created page with "This is a property of type ...".

Cheers

00:09, 29 October 2012