A related question: how many WD statements are already part of a time series? Let's say this means
properties qualified by point in time (
P585)
where there are at least four other instances of that property with a point-in-time qualifier.
This query suggests it's roughly 800K statements in all; with around 400 outliers with over 400 such statements.
This is common enough, and for sufficiently high-interest/high-traffic entities, that it would be nice to have a more explicit way of handling this.
One suggestion: a norm of having a single most-recent value, for each time-series property, and a time-series property-space exclusively used for historical values. This would support explicitly noting where a time series is intended, allow for cleaner edit histories for that work, allow for including other time-series data that is in active use on Wikipedia, and help optimize queries for the most recent data.
For instance:
Iceland currently has over 2x as many properties as its main entry needs. It has
* 17 statements of life-expectancy
* 60 statements of population,
* 57 statements for nominal GDP,
* 57 statements for nominal GDP per capita, &c. --
(each qualified by point in time, reference)
Instead it could have a single statement for the latest value of each of these (qualified by point in time:
date, reference:
URL, and
time-series:
start date - end date). and an associated entity like
Q189/historical could have a time series; with the ~400 individual historical statements. Most queries and views could touch only the non-time-series statements, reflecting the most common uses of this data on the projects.
SJ