I don't like "significant digits"
because it depends on the writing system (base
10). I'd much rather express this as absolute values.
Yes, I would like too. What I argue is that the problem is that you
simply in 99.99999 % (not a researched of number of course) of cases
simply don't know more than that there is a given number of digits
base 10. Whether that is meaningful or just sloppy or even a wilfull
simplification (probably the vast majority of quantities in current
Wikipedia belong to the latter category) is unknown.
That means that the figure is not usable for query
answering at all. If we don't
know the level of certainty, we cannot use the number.
that will usually be the case. Unless you know which kind of margin
the numbers reflect, you cannot use it for answering anyways. What do
you do with the two examples:
100 +/- 50
and
100 +/- 0.1
that are the results of the same dataset and precisely reflect the
same quantity? If you know that the first is a 95% measure of
dispersion, and the second a 95% CI for the mean, you can ask people
whether they look for the mean (best estimate) or for a single
observation.
Make the
interval-points an option. If explicitly entered: excellent
information. If not: don't try to create (false) knowledge from void.
Yes, it will be an option. Making the default "unknown" would be bad though, I
think.
The default has to reflect reality. If you make it a complication to
enter the actual default situation, and automatically add a margin of
error/dispersion/tolerance whatever then people will simply allow it
to happen, start ignoring it, don't understand it, and in the end
Wikidata will be known as a bunch of unreliable encoded information.
However, we should probably store whether the level of
certainty was given
explicitly or estimated automatically based on the number of significant digits
- then we can still ignore automatic values when desired.
Which will force all re-users to understand this and to throw away
these values prior to any analysis...
Why so complicated?
Gregor