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It seems that somebody wanted to indicate that this old population is no
longer current.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.
Cheers,
Markus
--
Prof. Dr. Markus Kroetzsch
Knowledge-Based Systems Group
Faculty of Computer Science
TU Dresden
+49 351 463 38486
https://iccl.inf.tu-dresden.de/web/KBS/en