Sorry but I hardly see how this answer could come up into current
discussion. Please start another thread ;)

2016-08-14 15:14 GMT+02:00 Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]>:

> Hoi,
> Markus it is very much a matter of perspective and we do not all see
> things in the same way. For me the re-usability of Wikidata is very much
> secondary. Important but secondary. The primary goal of Wikidata is to
> provide a data storage for Wikimedia projects. The problem that I see is
> that much effort has gone in secondary goals largely at the cost of the
> primary perspective.
>
> For an editor of Wikidata Wikidata is hardly usable. It is very much
> because of tools like Reasonator that I can understand the data that is in
> Wikidata. It is also for this reason that "deprecation" will evolve away
> from you. It is wonderful that all these high level approaches exist but
> the problem is that it does not consider the effects on people editing
> Wikidata. SPARQL is now good enough to replace WDQ but the problem is that
> the tools build upon WDQ are not converted and SPARQL does not bring the
> easy use that I and others are accustomed to. There is no replacement for
> much of the functionality.
>
> We do agree that the architecture of Wikidata has to be stable but so does
> its tooling and this is where we fail and consequently see a divergence. In
> the past I asked you for tools and I supported additional funding on the
> promise of support for tooling. So far I have noticed that the quality of
> the engine has improved but I have not seen improvements in or the tooling
> that makes use of the SPARQL engine.
>
> For me all the attention to top level concerns have been at the cost of
> supporting people who actually enter the data. I do not see a strategy to
> converge Wikidata and Wikipedia editing and I have made the argument why
> this is vital for our quality repeatedly.
>
> So as you want to preserve top level integrity do consider tooling and do
> consider what it is we aim for.
> Thanks,
>        GerardM
>
> On 14 August 2016 at 14:26, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.
> de> wrote:
>
>> On 12.08.2016 17:24, Jean-Luc Léger wrote:
>>
>>> On 2016-08-11 22:29, Markus Kroetzsch wrote:
>>>
>>>     On 11.08.2016 18:45, Andra Waagmeester wrote:
>>>
>>>         On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Markus Kroetzsch
>>>         <[email protected]
>>>         <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>         <mailto:[email protected]
>>>
>>>         <mailto:[email protected]>>>
>>>         wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>             has a statement "population: 20,086 (point in time: 2011)"
>>>         that is
>>>             confirmed by a reference. Nevertheless, the statement is
>>>         marked as
>>>             "deprecated". This would mean that the statement "the
>>>         popluation was
>>>             20,086 in 2011" is wrong. As far as I can tell, this is not
>>>         the case.
>>>
>>>
>>>         I wouldn't say that with a deprecated rank, that statement is
>>>         "wrong". I
>>>         consider de term deprecated to indicate that a given statement
>>> is no
>>>         longer valid in the context of a given resource (reference). I
>>>         agree, in
>>>         this specific case the use of the deprecated rank is wrong,
>>> since no
>>>         references are given to that specific statement.
>>>         Nevertheless, I think it is possible to have disagreeing
>>>         resources on an
>>>         identical statement, where two identical statements exists, one
>>> with
>>>         rank "deprecated" and one with rank "normal". It is up to the
>>>         user to
>>>         decide which source s/he trusts.
>>>
>>>
>>>     The status "deprecated" is part of the claim of the statement. The
>>>     reference is supposed to support this claim, which in this case is
>>>     also the claim that it is deprecated. The status is not meant to
>>>     deprecate a reference (not saying that this is never useful,
>>>     potentially, but you can only use it in one way, and it seems much
>>>     more practical if deprecated statements get references that explain
>>>     why they are deprecated).
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes. I think a complete deprecated statement should look like this :
>>>
>>> Rank: Deprecated
>>> Value: <some value>
>>> Qualifier: P2241:reason for deprecation + <some reason>
>>>
>>> References
>>> * P248:Stated in (or any other property for a reference)   --> a
>>> reference where the value is true (explaining why we added it)
>>>   Value: <name of the reference>
>>>   + any additional qualifiers
>>> * P1310:statement disputed by                              --> a
>>> reference explaining why the claim is deprecated
>>>   Value: <name of the reference>
>>>   + any additional qualifiers
>>>
>>
>> I am afraid that this is not a good approach, and it will lead to
>> problems in the future. The status "deprecated" refers to the *complete
>> claim, including all qualifiers*. So if you add a qualifier P2241, it would
>> also be part of what is "deprecated", which is clearly not intended here.
>> This is part of the general data structure in Wikidata, and tools using the
>> data would expect this to hold true. Ranks are a built-in feature of the
>> software, so this aspect is not really open to interpretation.
>>
>> What you are doing here is giving up part of the pre-defined structure
>> and replacing it by some local (site-specific) consensus. I know that this
>> might be a bit subtle and not so easy to see at first, but it is a big step
>> away from structured data that is easy to share across applications.
>>
>> For example, imagine an application wants to compare "normal" statements
>> with "deprecated" statements to see if there is any apparent contradiction
>> (the same statement being given with both ranks). This would no longer work
>> if you add meta-information to deprecated statements in the form of
>> qualifiers. For a software tool, an additional quantifier simply changes
>> the meaning. Imagine that one statement has an additional "end date"
>> qualifier that the other one is lacking -- clearly, it would be perfectly
>> reasonable that the statement with the end date is deprecated while the one
>> that has only a start but no end is not. Technically, there is no
>> difference between this situation and the situation where you add a new
>> qualifier "P2241".
>>
>> Now you could say: "Software should know the special meaning of P2241 and
>> treat it accordingly." But this is only working for one site (Wikidata in
>> this case). A future Wikibase-enabled Commons or Wiktionary would use
>> different properties. You end up with having to change software for each
>> site, and severely reducing interoperability across sites (imagine you want
>> to combine data from two sites before processing it).
>>
>> Even if you are only interested in a single site (Wikidata), you are
>> changing the way in which statements should be interpreted over time. If
>> the community uses qualifiers to change the data model like this, then the
>> current definition of these qualifiers dictates how statements should be
>> interpreted. Then if you want to analyse history, things can be very
>> difficult.
>>
>> What to do? It is quite simple: P2241 clearly belongs into the reference
>> of a deprecated statement, not into its qualifiers. This will retain the
>> same information while keeping the distinction between the claim that is
>> deprecated (and which may have qualifiers) and the meta-data that explains
>> why this is the case. Indeed, giving justification and explanation for a
>> statement is precisely what the references are for, so P2241 fits there
>>
>>
>> I am not so sure if the rest of your modelling can work either, since it
>> seems to me that you cannot in general capture two references (the original
>> "P248" one and the correcting "P1310" one) in a single reference. Giving
>> them both as two individual references would be a bad idea, since it would
>> again change the meaning of the data, since you would give two mutually
>> contradicting references for the same claim, and site-specific extra
>> information would be needed to understand what is going on.
>>
>> In fact, this is another expectation that is implicit in the Wikidata
>> data model: if you have a claim C with two references A and B, then you
>> could as well have claim C twice, once with reference A and once with
>> reference B. References therefore should never have cross-dependencies or
>> play different roles.
>>
>> Maybe I misunderstood and you meant something else: you could of course
>> make a single reference and use a specific form (with only two properties,
>> P248 and P1310). But then you need to use single items for each of the
>> references. Many references on Wikidata are not expressed by single items
>> but by many property-value pairs (think of "reference URL + retrieved +
>> ..."). Such compound references would then not work in this encoding.
>>
>> What to do? In general, I think it is most important to give the
>> reference that explains the deprecation, not the (mistaken) one that claims
>> a wrong thing. This also makes sense for other reasons: if we create
>> statistics such as "80% of all Wikidata statements have references" then we
>> don't want to count deprecated statements where the only reference given
>> claims that the wrong thing is actually true. A "deprecated statement with
>> reference" should always be one where we have a reference that supports the
>> claim that the statement is not true (justifies why it is deprecated).
>> Again, you can see here how important it is to stick to certain boundaries
>> of interpretation when you want to process data with tools later on.
>>
>>
>> If my suggestions somehow don't work in practice, then the best way would
>> be to file a feature request for having additional meta-data for deprecated
>> statements. Since the ranks are built into the software, any solution that
>> really needs to change the meaning of the software needs to be implemented
>> in code. Then it would be the same approach on all future Wikibase sites
>> and software could work with it. However, I really hope that the
>> reference-based approach is acceptable to the Wikidata community in
>> practice.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Markus
>>
>>
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