Hi James,

I would immediately agree to the following measures to alleviate your problem:

(1) If some instance-of statements are historic (i.e., no longer valid), then one should make the current ones "preferred" and leave the historic ones "normal", just like for, e.g., population numbers. This would get rid of the rather inappropriate "Free imperial city" label for Frankfurt.

(2) If some classes are redundant, they could be removed (e.g., if we already have "Big city" we do not need "city"). However, community might decide to prefer the direct use of a main class (such as "Human"), even if redundant.

The other issues you mention are more tricky. Especially issues of translation/cultural specificity. The most specific classes are not always the ones that all languages would want to see, e.g., if the concept of the class is not known in that language.

Possible options for solving your problem:

* Make a whitelist of classes you want to show at all in the template, and default to "city" if none of them occurs.
* Make a blacklist of classes you want to hide.
* Instead of blacklist or whitelist, show only classes that have a Wikipedia page in your language; default to "city" if there are none.
* Try to generalise overly specific classes (change "big city" to "city" etc.). I don't know if there is a good programmatic approach for this, or if you would have to make a substitution list or something, which would not be very maintainable.
* Do not use instance-of information like this in the infobox. It might sound radical, but I am not sure if "instance of" is really working very well for labelling things in the way you expect. Instance-of can refer to many orthogonal properties of an object, in essentially random order, while a label should probably focus on certain aspects only.

For obvious reasons, ranks of statements cannot be used to record language-specific preferences.

Cheers,

Markus

On 27.11.2015 15:58, James Heald wrote:

Some items have quite a lot of "instance of" statements, connecting them
to quite a few different classes.

For example, Frankfurt is currently an instance of seven different classes,
     https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1794

and Glasgow is currently an instance of five different classes:
     https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4093

This can produce quite a pile-up of descriptions in the
description/subtitle section of an infobox -- for example, as on the
Spanish page for Frankfurt at
     https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A1ncfort_del_Meno
in the section between the infobox title and the picture.


Question:

Is it an appropriate use of ranking, to choose a few of the values to
display, and set those values to be "preferred rank" ?

It would be useful to have wider input, as to whether it is a good thing
as to whether this is done widely.

Discussions are open at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Preferred_and_normal_rank

and
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bistro#Rang_pr.C3.A9f.C3.A9r.C3.A9

-- but these have so far been inconclusive, and have got slightly taken
over by questions such as

* how well terms really do map from one language to another --
near-equivalences that may be near enough for sitelinks may be jarring
or insufficient when presented boldly up-front in an infobox.

(For example, the French translation "ville" is rather unspecific, and
perhaps inadequate in what it conveys, compared to "city" in English or
"ciudad" in Spanish; "town" in English (which might have over 100,000
inhabitants) doesn't necessarily match "bourg" in French or "Kleinstadt"
in German).

* whether different-language wikis may seek different degrees of
generalisation or specificity in such sub-title areas, depending on how
"close" the subject is to that wiki.

(For readers in some languages, some fine distinctions may be highly
relevant and familiar, whereas for other language groups that level of
detail may be undesirably obscure).


There is also the question of the effect of promoting some values to
"preferred rank" for the visibility of other values in SPARQL -- in
particular when so queries are written assuming they can get away with
using just the simple "truthy" wdt:... form of properties.

However, making eg the value "city" preferred for Glasgow means that it
will no longer be returned in searches for its other values, if these
have been written using "wdt:..." -- so it will now be missed in a
simple-level query for "council areas", the current top-level
administrative subdivisions of Scotland, or for historically-based
"registration counties" -- and this problem will become more pronounced
if the practice becomes more widespread of making some values
"preferred" (and so other values invisible, at least for queries using
wdt:...).

 From a SPARQL point of view, what would actually be very helpful would
to add a (new) fourth rank -- "misleading without qualifier", below
"normal" but above "deprecated" -- for statements that *are* true (with
the qualifiers), but could be misleading without them
* for example, for a town that was the county town of a shire once, but
hasn't been for two centuries
* or for an administrative area that is partly located in one
higher-level division, and partly in another -- this is very valuable
information to be able to note, but it's important to be able to exclude
it from being all included in a recursive search for the places in one
(but not the other) of that higher-level division.

The statements shouldn't be marked "deprecated", because they are true
(unlike a widely-given but incorrect date of birth, for example).  At
the moment one can sort of work round the issue, if one can find another
statement to make "preferred", so that the qualified statement becomes
invisible to a simple search without qualifiers.  However, if
"preferred" status is going to be used just to select things to show in
infoboxes, it becomes very desirable that "wdt:..." searches should
retrieve things at normal rank as well -- creating a need for a new rank
for statements which are true, but misleading if read without qualifiers.


What *is* needed though, is a view on whether trying to tailor what is
shown in infoboxes is an appropriate reason to alter statement rankings.

It would be good to get a view on this.

The Spanish guys who stated doing this have temporarily put further
rank-changes on hold, for the issue to be discussed; but so far what
they have done has only just scratched the surface of what could be done
-- there are still a lot more cases of multiple values they would like
to tidy.

So: is this the kind of thing that "preferred rank" is envisaged for ?

Or, should some statements not be marked as less preferred than others,
if this is the only reason ?


    --  James.


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