Template talk:Job

Clarification of limitations

This template is bumping up against the limits of SMW, since assigning so many associated properties to a single entity requires it to be a subject in itself, i.e. to have a handle on which separate simple properties can be hung. One page per job sounds like a non-starter; another possibility could be a separate page section, but that sounds fiddly and/or not how SMW is designed to work - an uphill struggle at best. There must be other SMW wikis who have faced this problem, so advice from more seasoned SMW users/developers would be good, even if the answer is to await a richer software platform. The template is as functional as I can easily make it with my level of skill in RDF/SMW, and is good enough for the time being - it can be rewritten later to represent the data semantically however seems convenient. Robin (talk) 07:23, 8 February 2014 (GMT)

• The Deputy and Boss sections for jobs are correct, but have a warning triangle and unwanted messages. Now fixed -- Robin (talk) 10:37, 14 April 2016 (IST)

This one could need a |party= , for members of parliament etc. Terje (talk) 10:00, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, people have {{t|political_party}}, though I suppose that does change sometimes, so attaching it to specific jobs would add something... I'll have a go at this. -- Robin (talk) 19:17, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Robin, could you add a style guide here for jobs with commas in them, for example "Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology"? Terje (talk) 06:28, 24 August 2022 (UTC)

Handling commas in job titles

One limitation of SMW as used here is that the comma character (",") is employed as a separator. This makes for very readable source text, and allows for easy cutting and pasting of name lists. With people's names it doesn't cause a problem, since they never include commas. However, other names can, especially jobs. To see why this is an issue, here's the source of the Spain/Minister/Education Culture and Sport page:

{{employment
|wikipedia=
|start=
|interests=
|constitutes=Minister of Education, Minister of Culture, Minister of Sport
}}

Here the |constitutes line is currently interpreted by SMW to mean that the this job simultaneously constitutes 3 things: Minister of Education, Minister of Culture and Minister of Sport. If the line were |constitutes=Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence Equipment, Support and Technology then the software would similarly create the constitutes relationship with the two items it sees as being listed: Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence Equipment and Support and Technology.

To avoid the ambiguity of whether to treat "," as a separator, the rule since 2014 has been that commas are not permitted in titles of pages. This raises the question of what to call pages which should properly have one or more commas in the title. The current standard practice is simply to omit them, so the above job would be restyled "Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence Equipment Support and Technology". This is not an ideal solution, and I'm open to alternative suggestions, including improved SMW templates.

Note by the way that commas are permitted as titles of redirects, so creating a link from the correct title (with comma) allows it to be used to reference the commaless pagename. -- Robin (talk) 17:59, 24 August 2022 (UTC)