Hi,
Does anybody know the current documentation of the precision of the
globe coordinate datatype? This precision was introduced after the
original datamodel discussions.
I used to believe that it was a rough, informal indication of a
precision based on an (easy-to-process but necessarily rather
inaccurate) bounding box. After all, the UI only allows for a small
number of predefined settings.
However, the data contains many values with precision value "null". What
is this supposed to mean and how should consumers treat it? The
precision of a measure cannot be "0" (and in any case, 0 is none of the
supported constants in the UI).
In addition, the data also contains some seemingly arbitrary numbers as
precision, such as a precision of 10.372851422071 degrees for the
location of Oceania (Q538). Now given the fact that the Earth is not
flat and Oceania is not a square, I fail to see the possible utility of
such an extremely detailed custom precision value. My point is that the
area (bounding box) that any such tolerance describes on Earth depends
on the location of the center point, and is hardly capturing our exact
amount of uncertainty in any strong sense. So why bother with such
custom values?
At first I thought this would be an error in the data, but the UI has a
special handling for it (quite literally: it shows the word "special"
with the precision in parentheses). However, I cannot edit this value as
a user without resetting it to one of the predefined values. This seems
a huge limitation, which would require a very good reason for supporting
such odd values at all. Or is the behaviour of the UI just a way of
recovering from an error while avoiding to simply fix it by itself?
Should we have a bot that corrects such cases to the nearest existing
precision setting?
Cheers,
Markus