[Data-modeling] Adopted Children

[Tom Morris]

I'd love to see this get implemented.  You could get rid of the
redundant "siblings" property too, since it's derivable.

> i like this idea, but to sum the discussion heres crisms post
>
> "It’s less a decision to obscure the facts as a lack of a compelling use
> case for a more complicated model. The current model is simple and handles
> 95% of the use cases. To complicate the parent-child
> relationship—quadrupling the amount of information needed to represent it,
> in even the simplest cases—really needs a compelling use case."

Here's my reply to that from June 2008:
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Another long delay - I need to remember to login in more than once a
month (or figure out how to get RSS feeds set up).

I guess the real answer to whether the accuracy is needed depends on
whether Freebase has aspirations to hold genealogical data.  The
current scheme isn't adequate for anything genealogical, including
medical applications which need genealogical information.

I tend to lean towards the "if you're going to do it, you should do it
right" camp, but I recognize that that often leads to over
engineering.  I don't know anything about how Freebase stores things
internally, so it's difficult to evaluate where the "quadrupling"
comes in and how big an impact it has in real world terms.

On the other hand, no one's addressed the sibling side of the
argument.  That could clearly be derived from traversing the
parent-child graph as well, yet it seems to have been important enough
to record separately (and redundantly).

That's enough lobbying for me though.  If anyone ever decides to
change the decision, ping me and I'll provide pointers to how things
are modeled in the genealogical data world.