I work on data concerning artworks, particularly in Wikidata, mainly artworks of French cultural heritage.
It made for an amusing observation.
On Wikidata, many artworks have a 'genre' property (P136). To get some inspiration from the values used for this property, I performed the following query on WDQS, the SPARQL access point associated with Wikidata:
select ?genre (count(?s) as ?c)
where {
?s wdt:P136 ?genre
}
group by ?genre
order by desc(?c)
This gave me the values used and their number of uses. To get the labels associated with these values, I had to juggle a bit with the queries to avoid timeouts, but that's not the point of this post.
Among the first results is the nude, which corresponds to the Wikidata entity Q40446 -whose French label is 'nu', with the description 'artistic representation of a naked human body'. This type of artwork has 2758 instances registered in Wikidata as of 4/11/2023.
But looking further down the list, we find another kind of work, also with the French 'nu' label. This is entity Q14402. Contributors have used this other entity for the genre of 6 artworks. This entity refers to the Greek letter NU. A look at the corresponding works shows us that there has been an amusing confusion. In French, 'nu' can mean two different things!
(note: you can no longer observe this confusion: I corrected it by hand in Wikidata, for 6 artworks it wasn't too painful; it seems that at least some of these errors were imported from Wikimedia Commons: I didn't correct Wikimedia Commons)
