Wikidata:Property proposal/start grade

start grade

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Organization

   Done: start grade (P7086) (Talk and documentation)

Description	Lowest educational year (aka grade) taught by this institution
Represents	educational year (Q10291405)
Data type	Item
Template parameter	"grades", "years", "years_taught", "nursery_years_taught", "primary_years_taught", "secondary_years_taught" in en:Template:infobox school
Domain	instances of educational institution (Q2385804) (and its subclasses)
Allowed values	instances of educational year (Q10291405) (and its subclasses)
Example 1	Camden Haven High School (Q5025774) → Year 7 (Q17010108)
Example 2	Bob Lanier Middle School (Q21016026) → sixth grade (Q7533207)
Example 3	Austin High School (Q4823128) → ninth grade (Q7039258)
See also	end grade (proposal), gender educated (proposal)

Motivation

Used to record the range of grades taught at a school, e.g. K-12, K-6, 7-12, etc. Also used as qualifier on gender educated to handle partially coed schools that accept both sexes in some grades but only one sex in others. SJK (talk) 07:36, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

• Note: The concept of having years or grades in primary and secondary is universal, but the number of years/grades and their naming varies from country to country (and sometimes even between different regions of the same country.) Using an item as the value (rather than a number) gives us the flexibility to use whatever nomenclature is natural for each country. For example, many education systems have an initial year of primary/elementary education before year/grade 1, but it is sometimes called Kindergarten (US, some states of Australia), Reception (England, other states of Australia), Prep (yet other states of Australia), etc. Also, in some countries the numbering is restarted at secondary school (i.e. Form 1-6 rather than years/grades 7-12). So, items lets us us the most natural terminology for each education system, which will minimise user confusion (most people who edit school items are mainly editing schools in their own country, so it will be easier for them if they can use their country's natural terminology as much as possible). SJK (talk) 08:02, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Comment Instead of two new properties "start grade" and "end grade", I'm wondering if it wouldn't be preferable to create one property that enumerates the grades, including an item as value for each grade. --- Jura 12:24, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

@Jura1:. Thank you for responding. I think there are some issues with your proposal, and given those issues I think my original proposal here is superior:

• the amount of data entry required. Consider a school like St Andrew's Cathedral School (Q7592321) which teaches 13 grades (K-12). With "start grade" and "end grade" properties, a user only has to two create two properties with two values. With your proposal, a user has to enter one property with 13 different values. That is a lot more work.
• Infoboxes consistently display this information as a range (see e.g. en:St Andrew's Cathedral School has "grades" parameter in en:Template:Infobox school set to "K-12", not "K,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12". Storing this information as a range (with two properties) will make consumption by Infoboxes easier. (Probably some solution, involving e.g. a Lua module, could convert the set of grades into a range for display, but that will be a lot more work than simply storing a range in Wikidata to begin with.)
• If we have 13 values in one property, there is no guarantee they will be displayed in the right order.
• If you have to enter 13 values, there is a risk someone will omit one by accident. With only two values (start and end), accidental ommission is not such a risk.

One hypothetical advantage of your proposal, is suppose hypothetically there was a school that taught a discontinuous number of grades. For example, it teaches K-3 and 9-12, but not 4-8. Your proposal could handle that, mine can't. However, in practice, I have never heard of such a school existing, and I strongly suspect there are no such schools in the entire world – doing such a thing just simply doesn't make sense. In fact, if we went with your proposal, and found such a discontinuity, it would seem far more likely that it would be due to data entry error (accidental ommission of one or more grades) than due to a real discontinuity in the grades taught. SJK (talk) 00:26, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

• The data entry and display issues shouldn't be much of a problem (e.g. with QuickStatements, you can just type the QID once and then let the tool do.). I think it would make it easier to query for specific grades.
  A second alternative could be to make an item for the covered range and use that. The item for the range could then list each grade. --- Jura 06:06, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

@Jura1: I still think my solution would be more friendly for data entry, especially by beginners. Beginners don't use QuickStatements, and QuickStatements is far less user-friendly than the default Wikidata UI (it is a bit of an "expert" feature.) I agree that your solution makes it easier if someone wants to do a query "find me all schools that teach grade 4", although I'm dubious as to how common someone wanting to do such a query would be. The main use case here would be populating infoboxes like en:Template:Infobox school (and other language equivalents); I think a range will make the template code simpler; your query use case is not something that Wikipedia templates need. Regarding your second alternative, I don't think that is as user-friendly either - what if the range I need doesn't exist yet? How many possible ranges are there? Are we going to create them all, or just on-demand? If the range item doesn't exist yet, then a user needs to work out how to create the range item. With my solution, provided the grade items exist, the user doesn't have to create any further items. SJK (talk) 20:41, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

•  Support David (talk) 08:50, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
•  Support something needs to be done in the field. Personally, I'd have prefered the approach I had suggested. --- Jura 15:38, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@ديفيد عادل وهبة خليل 2, SJK, Jura1:  Done: start grade (P7086). − Pintoch (talk) 21:29, 23 July 2019 (UTC)