Some Wikidata labels are ambiguous (do not have one-to-one correspondence with Q identifiers)

I've been digging deeply into Wikidata, and I've found a possibly troubling problem. I was expecting that every label would have a one-to-one (bijective) correspondence with an identifier. However, I've found that's not the case.

I'm not sure if this a major problem that I should bring up with the Wikidata folks.

For example, the label "noise" in Wikidata has three QIDs:

Now, each of those QIDs has a 1-to-1 correspondence with a Wikipedia page, each of which has a title that disambiguates which "noise" it's referring to.

Here is an illustration of the above problem:

So why does Wikidata not have a label that disambiguates what type of "noise" it is? For example, Q11306265 should have a label called "noise (electronics)".

I've found 300+ such ambiguous labels. Here are some more examples:

"George Washington":

"The Four Seasons":

"Symphony No. 9":

However, the vast majority of Wikidata labels are unambiguous. For example, "football" is properly disambiguated like this:

Solution

This is how it's intended to be, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of items like this.

Wikidata's approach to naming is to have the label be "the most common name that the item would be known by" (WD Help:Label)

Where human-readable disambiguation is needed, the description field can be used; there is a technical requirement that where there is a label+description in any given language, then that pair should be unique, but [same label]+[different description] or [same label]+[no description] are both permitted.

The general rule isn't always exactly how it works in practice, of course. You do sometimes see cases where people have selected a disambiguation-first approach, like with the two types of football - though in this case, using "association football" neatly solves a conflict between "football" and "soccer" as the primary name. You also sometimes see items that have with a Wikipedia-type "(disambiguator)" note in the name - this has usually been imported by accident and never cleaned up.

But in general, labels are not unique, and are not intended to be unique.

You mentioned Wikipedia - here, the article titles are unique because each has to live at a specific URL, and the page title is defined as being the same as the URL. Requiring disambiguation in the title is a necessary evil because you cannot have two distinct concepts displayed on a single URL without causing a lot of confusion. Wikidata items use the numeric ID in their URLs, so that pressure has been removed.