Smalyshev added a comment.

@janzerebecki The issue here is that many items do not have preferred state. 
I.e. take https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30. 

What is the population of the USA? We don't have any number marked as 
preferred. We either have to report we have no idea about US population, or 
take the latest value by time point. 

Now, if we go to "contains administrative territorial entity", "Territory of 
Alaska" does not have "deprecated" mark, but it does have end date in 1959, so 
if we are asked "what are the sub-entites of the USA" we probably should not 
return it unless we're specifically asked about 1958. So again, we'd need to 
look into qualifiers.

Now, let's consider https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q76. Where does Barack Obama 
reside? We have two entries - "Capitol Hill" and "the White House" - none of 
them preferred, but only one of them current. 

But here we have more complicated case, because if we look at "awards 
received", we may want all entries listed, not just the latest one. So how we 
distinguish that from US population case, where we do want only the latest? Can 
we do it automatically or we'd have a human to write separate queries for these 
two?

Now, more generic question. If we have one preferred entry and one not, do we 
return only the preferred one? What if there are no preferred ones? I.e., in 
"ethnic group" for Obama we have "African American" and "Irish American", with 
the former preferred - do we return just that when asked for Obama's ethnic 
group? But for "surname" we don't have anything preferred - we can't return 
nothing there, right? We could opt for "return preferred if exists, otherwise 
all" but that means slowing things down as we'd have to scan all data just to 
find out if we have any preferred - and we'd have to do it on each step of the 
search, since match for non-preferred then won't count I assume. And we still 
have cases like "US population" where getting all of them is no good - i.e. if 
we ask "what is 10 most populous countries" we do want to compare latest 
figures, right?

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To: Smalyshev
Cc: Smalyshev, Manybubbles, GWicke, JanZerebecki, jkroll, Wikidata-bugs, aude, 
daniel



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