daniel added a comment. @kaldari: The Quantity data type is mainly intended for measured values. These are never absolutely exact. This notion becomes crucial when applying unit conversion (we'll have that Really Soon Now TM): If a building is said to be 281 feet tall, and we convert this to meters for display, the result should not be 85.6488 - that would imply a level of accuracy not present in the original value. Conventionally, "281 feet tall" means 281 feet +/- 1 (or +/- 0.5 -- but that's a different discussion). With that assumption, we can say that the building is 56.7 meters tall, +/- 0.3088. This results in one significant digit after the decimal point to be included in the output, reflecting the level of accuracy in of original value correctly.
The case is different for exact counts, like the numbers of electrons in an atom, or the number of seats in a parliament. But in the bigger picture, these are the exception. The impression is distorted by the fact that we sadly still don't have unit support. Introducing a separate data type for exact counts (not population!) would allow us to avoid the "assumption of uncertainty" for properties that typically have exact values. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T68580 REPLY HANDLER ACTIONS Reply to comment or attach files, or !close, !claim, !unsubscribe or !assign <username>. EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: daniel Cc: kaldari, Gareth, Ayack, geraki, Bugreporter, DSGalaktos, Wikidata-bugs, SPQRobin, jayvdb, Snaterlicious, Liuxinyu970226, Lydia_Pintscher, daniel, aude _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
