geraki added a comment. I see some strong opinion that specially for population a "margin of uncertainty" is needed by default. I don't get it. Experience suggests that if there is a "margin of uncertainty" it will be mentioned in the sources. Common sense suggests that if it is not mentioned, then any default or manual specified margin, +/- 1 or +/-50000 is arbitrary, since the default applies to numbers between zero and billions. They would not have the same level of uncertainty.
The population of a small village would not have the same margin of uncertainty with the population of a country. For example: a small island <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1419053> with population of **1** (one). Is it ±1? Does it suggest that the population is in the range of 0-2? No, the census agents found only one person stating that he lives in that island. Other small islands and abandoned villages have population of **0** (zero). The arbitrary "margin of uncertainty" would suggest that "maybe there is at least one" even if there is no building to house him. And while the default ±1 for our small island may suggest that the census agents either missed a person or counted someone who does not live there, the same default ±1 suggests that the population of the country is precise to one person more or less, while the addition of the populations of all cities, villages and islands like this would need to summarize also these margins of uncertainty. On the other hand, for the USA <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30> we also have **±1** for a population of **318.697.314**!!! Probably the default. But what does that mean? The census on that small island may have a 100% difference with reality, but an estimation for the whole USA does not have more that 0,0000000001% error? For Germany it is at ±500, for France ±50.000, Netherlands ±1... No. None of the sources used for these populations mention any precision or margin of uncertainty. If for an almost uninhabited island we specify a default ±1, then ±500 sounds better for a population of millions. and ±50.000 sounds even better. But why do I need to choose? TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T68580 EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: geraki Cc: Izno, Smalyshev, kaldari, Gareth, Ayack, geraki, Bugreporter, DSGalaktos, Wikidata-bugs, SPQRobin, jayvdb, Snaterlicious, Liuxinyu970226, Lydia_Pintscher, daniel, aude _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
