Property talk:Has cause

Discussion

This is currently too broadly defined, resulting the currently unhelpfulness of the SMWDocs' "The Official Culprit" section. As an aid to reflection, let's pick a significant and multi-faceted example, the Iraq War 2003‎. Firstly, I like the ON_ dichotomy, which allows us at a stroke to ignore yellowcake uranium, weapons inspectors etc. Now, what are the real causes? They have different types. How to go about the task of classifying these different types of causes? Maybe the biological idea of type specimens could help:

• Peak Oil - Not exactly a cause as such, but definitely important background
• Document:Downing Street Memo - More a symptom rather than a cause
• Halliburton - Clearly related, but again, not really a cause as such
• Iraq War 2003/Perpetrators - (Property:Has perpetrator) Plural is intentional; for most of the events here, the Lone Nut hypothesis is not applicable. It is almost always a team.
• Iraq War 2003/Originator - (Property:Has originator?) Singular since someone, whoever it was, was the first person to verbalise the idea "Let's organise an invasion of US". This will (I guess) always be one of the perpetrators, but not necessarily the person(s) who pick(s) up idea and runs with it, the chief organiser(s) so to speak.

The use of subPages is not accidental (since it's hard to say for sure who the originator of the Iraq War was, and for the current purpose also immaterial). The discussion of subPages of events is related, but let's keep the discussion here since it's more tightly defined question. Now that SMW has been demonstrated on the site, I think we're better placed to answer "How many different types of (real) cause is it worth defining at this stage? What are they?" Robin (talk) 03:33, 11 February 2014 (GMT)

First blush observations with more thought needed: I agree it IS too broadly defined and therefore of use only in rare instances of simple events - of which there are few in the subject matter of the site.

Motive(s) is intimately bound up with Cause(s) too. I'm deeply into trying to formalise precisely these things in the World War I pages at present. I have a VERY clear understanding of HOW it came about, WHO the prime movers were and WHAT motivated them, but shoe-horning these disparate aspects into a coherent structure and narrative is hard work and I keep hitting issues with the present property structure - the aspect-event thing you pointed out is just one of them. My problem is that I'm so engrossed in harvesting and presenting information that don't pay as much attention to this as I should - at least until it's a bit MORE developed. That said I never expected it to get this far so this is by no means a belly-ache. A comprehensive description of any event requires just 6 questions to be answered: WHO?, WHAT?, HOW?, WHEN?, WHERE? and WHY? . Since this is about how best to structure WS page groups concerning events, I think properties and templates need to cater for all 6 of them - not necessarily by the use those 6 word-questions explicitly (though that may be a good approach) but by testing all new stuff against them - eg is anything missed out? --Peter P (talk) 07:33, 11 February 2014 (GMT)

That's clear enough. Let's use WWI as a source of type specimens - certainly topical and maybe clearer. I'm not up to speed on that, so it'd be good to learn more. I reckon that those 6 cover a good 99% of it at least. Are we just talking about events? I wonder how well this approach works on other objects... Robin (talk) 18:53, 11 February 2014 (GMT)