Project:Home
Internet domain names, like wikibase.cloud, have peculiar properties. They are nominally identifiers to underlying resources, like nytimes.com and The New York Times. However, they are not persistent identifiers, as their value can change. Rather, publications and their owners are more like tenants over the domain name, and can decide to vacate the domain in favor of a new owner.
This poses a significant challenge to modeling information sources. If a URL is identified as a reference in a Wikipedia article, and that URL is associated with a domain that has changed owners, the URL in question may or may not be a reliable source depending on when it was published.
As an interim solution, we have created the Internet Domains Wikibase, which creates items for individual domain names and then seeks to associate those with the publication or conceptual website they describe (via Wikidata item). Wikibase allows us to create nuanced statements through qualifiers, which is useful for describing the history of a domain name's ownership.
Properties
Create new ones as needed through Special:NewProperty.