Hi!
- I would really like dates (mainly, born/died), especially if they work
for "greater units", that is, I search for a year and get an item back, even though the statament is month- or day-precise
This is something I've been thinking about for a while, mainly because the way we index dates now does not serve some important use cases. Even in the Query Service we treat dates as fixed instants on the time scale, whereas some dates are not instants but intervals (which in captured in wikidata Precision but we are currently not paying any attention to it), in fact many of the dates we use are more of interval-y nature than instant-y.
This makes searching for "somebody that was born in 1820" possible but laborious (you need to do intervals manually) and inefficient since we can't just look up by year.
There are certainly improvement possible in this area, not yet sure how to do it though.