Hey everyone,
Since some time now ranks are available. They are meant as a way to help manage the vast amount of information in Wikidata and make sense of them. One important point is to be able to "hide" old and wrong information using the normal and deprecated ranks. This allows us to for example only show the current leader of a country when asked for it instead of all the ones that have had this title at some point in the past. We want to move forward with making use of this now. This means a few things in particular: * The property parser function {{#property:P123}} will be changed to only return preferred values if they are available. If none are available then the normal ones will be returned. * Lua will be adapted to also by default only return preferred values if available and otherwise normal values. * Simple queries (like "give me the item with ISBN 12345678) will only return items with the value marked as preferred if available and otherwise normal values. * Complex queries will only return items with the values marked as preferred (and if not available normal) initially. Later all can be searched for explicitly as well but by default still only items with the values marked as preferred (and if not available normal) will be returned.
This in essence means that people will need to start marking values as preferred and deprecated where appropriate. This change will happen within the next weeks. I don't yet know exactly when the code change will be ready.
Onwards to a Wikidata that can meaningfully work with historical information \o/
Cheers Lydia