Veyndan

Welcome to Wikidata, Veyndan!

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Best regards! ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:01, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Previous discussion was archived at User talk:Veyndan/Archive 1 on 2022-01-30.

Please don't add this to existing countries.

Hi,

Same comment. I'm not sure what you want to do but this is a very bad idea.

I was trying to query countries that are currently soverign states. A soverign state with no value as its "end time" would inherintly be a current soverign state. I've since made a less elegant query as I noticed my edits were being reverted.

Do either of you care to elaborate on why this shouldn't be done? I tried searching for existing conversations about the use of an "end time" qualifier with no value, but nothing conclusive came up.

Hmm,

What is your query precisely? (I don't see how to query for a value "no value" is more "elegant" than a direct query for no value ; it's subjective of course, but the later seems more simple and elegant to me, see https://w.wiki/BEAy).

Your edits are reverted because it's not the current model for countries (and if you want to change the current model, it's your responsibility to convince the community that your proposition is good ; you are probably breaking other people query that relies on the current model) and it's not exactly the usual practice for using "no value" and "unknown value" (which is more when something is expected to have a value but doesn't, like someone who don't have a father or a child). In the end, it seems your adapting the data yo your specific need instead of making them usable by everyone. Also, if you didn't find conversations, maybe you should start one.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as doing a direct query for no value, as in the query you linked we get results like Q68678 which are no longer sovereign states as they no longer exist. The "inelegance" comes from the fact that we now need to exclude those states somehow, e.g., excluding states are a Q3024240. An alternative solution to keep the elegance of the no value approach is to go through all of those defunct states and add the appropriate "end time"s to them.

I take your point arround bringing up such a change with the larger community before embarking on the edits. I will keep that in mind in future.

Perhaps I will have a crack at the alternative solution I outlined above (i.e., add appropriate end times to historical soverign states) as I can't imagine that being contentious.

Yes, a query can only query existing data (the query can be adapted tho, by looking at other properties or ranking).

When data is missing, it should be added. Here it's obvious, feel free to add the end data on them. I did it for république socialiste soviétique de Biélorussie (Q68678).

We assume that sovereign state without "end time" would be a current sovereign state. The query for this is as simple as https://w.wiki/BF2v (we just use preferred values, which are not "sovereign state" for Q3024240). That's why your addition disrupt such a logic.