On Thu, Aug 11, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Markus Kroetzsch <markus.kroetzsch@tu-dresden.de> wrote:

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.

I wouldn't say that with a deprecated rank, that statement is "wrong". I consider de term deprecated to indicate that a given statement is no longer valid in the context of a given resource (reference). I agree, in this specific case the use of the deprecated rank is wrong, since no references are given to that specific statement.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to have disagreeing resources on an identical statement, where two identical statements exists, one with rank "deprecated" and one with rank "normal". It is up to the user to decide which source s/he trusts.

It seems that somebody wanted to indicate that this old population is no longer current.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".

I would argue that this is better done by using qualifiers (e.g. start data, end data). If a statement on the population size would be set to preferred, but isn't monitored for quite some time, it can be difficult to see if the "preferred" statement is still accurate, whereas a qualifier would give a better indication that that stament might need an update.

Cheers,

Andra