Dear Vlad,

Ordering claims on a page as you suggest would not work well, since several other orders must take precedence over the order you suggest. First of all, statements are grouped by property and you don't want to change this. Hence, you cannot use the order across statements of different properties, since this would force you in some cases to ungroup (which would have other disadvantages).

Second, it makes sense to order statements of one property by other aspects, e.g., by time, to make it possible for humans to find something. Hence, again, we are not free to use the order to encode further information.

So what remains is to order quantifiers inside statements, but there it is rarely relevant (usually there are only a few qualifiers and all of them can be seen at once, without getting tired).

In summary, order does not lend itself as a way to encode much additional information, since there are usability concerns that make you want to change order in different contexts (or maybe for different users), since order cannot be preserved when remixing data, and since it is overall too implicit for people to build up a shared understanding of what it is supposed to mean (you don't want fights about whether some item has to be in fourth or fifth position of some list based on some vague understanding of "quality" or "trustworthiness" -- it would be very hard to find objective arguments for or against a particular order).

Cheers,

Markus

On 29.11.2017 12:45, Владимир Рябцев wrote:

OK Lydia, what is the purpose of giving order of qualifiers then?

Along with helping to give a user a better representation of data, the order can be useful in automated processing of properties. To my mind, it starts with the most important entity data. Moreover, in case of contradiction, I would assume that first properties are “ranked” higher. After all we are humans and pay more attention to the top of page. Our mind may get bit tired by the end of page. In an ideal world you are right that order does not matter, but in the reality it may help algorithms.

Vlad

29 нояб. 2017 г., в 14:19, Lydia Pintscher <lydia.pintscher@wikimedia.de> написал(а):

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 11:14 AM, Владимир Рябцев <greatvovan@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for the link with sorted properties. Is this page updated
automatically or maintained manually by someone? In latter case this looks
weird to me, because the order may become not actual at some moment.

Yes it is maintained by hand by the editors.

It is curious that when properties are used as qualifiers we have a separate
field specifying the order (called ‘qualifiers-order’). Why not to add the
same at the top-level of entity definition?

It is just a heading to make the page more manageable - it doesn't
have a meaning beyond that.


Cheers
Lydia

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