On 01.09.2015 05:11, Stas Malyshev wrote:
Hi!
Then what happens with the "unit":"1" that currently we have in JSON? It seems that one cannot enter this string in the field, and I guess it would (rightly) be invalid as a unit. Will Wikibase continue to use this (invalid) string as a placeholder for "no unit"?
We could make a bot to convert those to Q199. RDF export already does it. Of course, not all of them are actually unit-less values, some of them may be something that actually needs a unit, so we could wait for a while to give people a chance to fix that and then convert the remaining ones to Q199.
The question is if "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q199" is really supposed to be the new "1" in the UI and/or JSON. At the moment, entering "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q199" as a unit in the UI does not lead to a unit-less value.
Also, I don't see a reason why the JSON encoding should use an IRI there. It makes sense to use a fixed IRI in RDF, since it is easier to query, but for JSON the easiest solution would be to use some fixed string (e.g., "" or even the current "1"). Replacing "1" by a longer IRI string does not seem to help anyone. I would suggest keeping the "1" as a marker for "no unit". Of course, this "1" would never be shown in the UI (but this is already as it is implemented :-). This solution would also provide best backwards compatibility for JSON users and incur no transition cost for Wikidata.
Regarding the IRI used in RDF, we should consider minting a special IRI in the Wikibase ontology for this special case. We already know that there is only one "1" and its meaning will have to be hardcoded in Wikibase and elsewhere. If we create a special IRI for denoting this situation, it will be better distinguished from other (regular) units, and there will be no dependency on the current content of Wikidata's Q199.
Markus