User talk:Greenny

Preferred rank

Can you say a bit about this edit on Cardiff (Q10690) (and the many similar edits you have recently made) ? Is there an important reason for them, and are they 100% necessary ?

Now that you have changed the rank of instance of (P31) = city (Q515) above all others, that has made all the other values invisible for bots or searches or rdf dumps running at the default 'simple' Wikidata level, that only includes statements for each property with the highest rank. (as used eg in any line in a SPARQL search using the wdt:... prefix).

So, for example, you have just broken the SPARQL searches in column 2 and column 4 of the template below for all the 'principal areas' in Wales. It should return 22, it is now only finding 21.

• principal area of Wales (Q15979307)    -- co-classes -- properties -- list / analysis -- (22)

Please, unless there is a very good reason for making some value 'preferred', can you revert these edits ? Jheald (talk) 14:55, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

I've got nearly the same question about Rennes (Q647). You added the preferred rank to two values and I find it very strange ; city (Q515) is a very fuzzy notion, I think it should not be preferred. Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 20:53, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

@VIGNERON: Why not? What's the first thing you would say Rennes is? I guess it would be «city», same as New York, Lucerne or Dubai. I included commune because big cities are usually the head of a higher administrative subdivision, whether it is a municipality, a province, a county, etc. Sure, it can be arguable what instances we should tag as preferred, but it is no doubt better to say Rennes is a city and a commune than a capital, less confusing in my opinion. Greenny (talk) 00:04, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: See also discussion thread now open at Project Chat, which may be the best place to discuss all aspects of this. @Greenny: I am just writing now a few words for es-wiki. I *very* much appreciate the consideration shown in the translations there to make the thread bilingual: thank you very much. Jheald (talk) 00:18, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

I just had to revert two of those changes. Because of them, Kiel and Lübeck suddenly weren't part of Germany anymore in some SPARQL queries. I don't think you should set "preferred" on a property value, just because it is the "first thing you would say" something is. As far as I understand it, preferred is used to mark the current or "best" value if there are multiple similar values, of which only one is valid. The way it works is that if something is marked as preferred, everything else is not found anymore by default. Therefore by marking for example city (Q515) in Kiel (Q1707) as preferred value for instance of (P31), by default Kiel isn't a municipality in Germany (Q262166) anymore. This breaks any query that looks those. Working around that by including non-preferred values is not an option either, since this will also include outdated information. In the case of Germany, former German entities like Szczecin (Q393) could suddenly be included in those queries. --Srittau (talk) 07:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

@Srittau: I made all those edits quickly so that the template shows «city (or whatever) of Germany» instead of «city, urban district, capital, big city and municipality of Germany», like now. I didn't check out the formal subdivisions in a first moment, because I was also editing instances in many other countries and trying to understand how they all work would have been too much work, so I wanted to solve the problem first.

This issue is already being discussed in the French bistro, as well as the Spanish Wikipedia and a mailing list, I suggest not making new changes until we reach an agreement. Greenny (talk) 11:18, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Babel

Hi, would you mind changing "no" to "nb" in your babel box? We're trying to get rid of "no", see phab:T102533 :) Danmichaelo (talk) 21:13, 4 June 2016 (UTC)