New subject: Preferred rank -- choices for infoboxes, versus SPARQL

27 Nov 2015

Some items have quite a lot of "instance of" statements, connecting them 
to quite a few different classes.

For example, Frankfurt is currently an instance of seven different classes,
     https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1794

and Glasgow is currently an instance of five different classes:
     https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4093

This can produce quite a pile-up of descriptions in the 
description/subtitle section of an infobox -- for example, as on the 
Spanish page for Frankfurt at
     https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A1ncfort_del_Meno
in the section between the infobox title and the picture.

Question:

Is it an appropriate use of ranking, to choose a few of the values to 
display, and set those values to be "preferred rank" ?

It would be useful to have wider input, as to whether it is a good thing 
as to whether this is done widely.

Discussions are open at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Preferred_and_normal_ra…
and
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bistro#Rang_pr.C3.A9f.C3.A9r.C3.A9

-- but these have so far been inconclusive, and have got slightly taken 
over by questions such as

* how well terms really do map from one language to another -- 
near-equivalences that may be near enough for sitelinks may be jarring 
or insufficient when presented boldly up-front in an infobox.

(For example, the French translation "ville" is rather unspecific, and 
perhaps inadequate in what it conveys, compared to "city" in English or 
"ciudad" in Spanish; "town" in English (which might have over 100,000

inhabitants) doesn't necessarily match "bourg" in French or
"Kleinstadt" 
in German).

* whether different-language wikis may seek different degrees of 
generalisation or specificity in such sub-title areas, depending on how 
"close" the subject is to that wiki.

(For readers in some languages, some fine distinctions may be highly 
relevant and familiar, whereas for other language groups that level of 
detail may be undesirably obscure).

There is also the question of the effect of promoting some values to 
"preferred rank" for the visibility of other values in SPARQL -- in 
particular when so queries are written assuming they can get away with 
using just the simple "truthy" wdt:... form of properties.

However, making eg the value "city" preferred for Glasgow means that it 
will no longer be returned in searches for its other values, if these 
have been written using "wdt:..." -- so it will now be missed in a 
simple-level query for "council areas", the current top-level 
administrative subdivisions of Scotland, or for historically-based 
"registration counties" -- and this problem will become more pronounced 
if the practice becomes more widespread of making some values 
"preferred" (and so other values invisible, at least for queries using 
wdt:...).

 From a SPARQL point of view, what would actually be very helpful would 
to add a (new) fourth rank -- "misleading without qualifier", below 
"normal" but above "deprecated" -- for statements that *are* true
(with 
the qualifiers), but could be misleading without them
* for example, for a town that was the county town of a shire once, but 
hasn't been for two centuries
* or for an administrative area that is partly located in one 
higher-level division, and partly in another -- this is very valuable 
information to be able to note, but it's important to be able to exclude 
it from being all included in a recursive search for the places in one 
(but not the other) of that higher-level division.

The statements shouldn't be marked "deprecated", because they are true 
(unlike a widely-given but incorrect date of birth, for example).  At 
the moment one can sort of work round the issue, if one can find another 
statement to make "preferred", so that the qualified statement becomes 
invisible to a simple search without qualifiers.  However, if 
"preferred" status is going to be used just to select things to show in 
infoboxes, it becomes very desirable that "wdt:..." searches should 
retrieve things at normal rank as well -- creating a need for a new rank 
for statements which are true, but misleading if read without qualifiers.

What *is* needed though, is a view on whether trying to tailor what is 
shown in infoboxes is an appropriate reason to alter statement rankings.

It would be good to get a view on this.

The Spanish guys who stated doing this have temporarily put further 
rank-changes on hold, for the issue to be discussed; but so far what 
they have done has only just scratched the surface of what could be done 
-- there are still a lot more cases of multiple values they would like 
to tidy.

So: is this the kind of thing that "preferred rank" is envisaged for ?

Or, should some statements not be marked as less preferred than others, 
if this is the only reason ?

    --  James.