On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Markus Kroetzsch markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de wrote:
Dear all,
As you may know, statements in Wikidata can be marked as "preferred" or "deprecated" to distinguish them from the "normal" ones.
I found that many items have perfectly valid historical statements marked as "deprecated". For example, our showcase item "Kleinmachnow"
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q104192
has a statement "population: 20,086 (point in time: 2011)" that is confirmed by a reference. Nevertheless, the statement is marked as "deprecated". This would mean that the statement "the popluation was 20,086 in 2011" is wrong. As far as I can tell, this is not the case.
It seems that somebody wanted to indicate that this old population is no longer current. This is achieved not by deprecating the old value, but by setting another (newer) value as "preferred".
Similar problems occur for the mayor of this town.
I hope there is no deeper confusion in the community regarding this intended use of "preferred" and "deprecated". Most other items are using it correctly, it seems. The fact that it occurs in a showcase item is still making me a bit concerned.
At least on this item they were set by a now inactive user. Do you have more items to see if it is the same user there? Can someone fix the ranks in that item please?
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Ranking seems fine wrt deprecated rank and I've not seen much confusion around it.
Cheers Lydia