https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19198





--- Comment #1 from Markus Krötzsch <[email protected]>  2009-06-15 
08:04:12 UTC ---
It is true that all comparators act on sortkeys. This appears to be natural for
the comparators that assume some ordering on the results (e.g. ::>), but I
agree that it is potentially confusing for inequality. Since ::! is implemented
like all other comparators, it also acts on sortkeys, so in a way this is a
consequence of the design of the code. I agree that this needs better
documentation.

On the other hand, ::> and ::! refer to the same values for all properties,
which is rather useful for combining them in one query (Example: a US-based
wiki might have a page to show all countries starting with letter U, but not
the US). This would not be possible if both operators would refer to different
values. It seems strange to specifically change the behaviour for ::! of
Type:Page.

The real problem might be that one would actually like to have a dedicated "not
same as" operator for pages, e.g. something like [[!Mary Smith]], where you
really require some result to be unequal. The ::!, in contrast, only requires
some unequal value to be present, i.e. it checks for the presence of some
semantic information, while object inequality would check for the absence of
some information (namely the absence of any hint that the object equals "Mary
Smith").

More generally, it would be nice to negate query conditions. Are there any
syntax proposals for this? (Using "!" as above would only work for single
statements; maybe we should introduce a "NOT" that is used similar to "OR"?)


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