Topic on User talk:Marcus Cyron

Do we really add <no value> to date of death (P570) for living people? If so, why? And if so, do we also add <no value> to the 4001 other properties the person has no value for. I don't think we do. Your edit on Ulrike Peter (Q26839360) is honestly the first occurrence of a NV in P570 for a living person I have seen... so much so that I write a report to see how frequent it is. 77 occurrences.

select ?item ?dob where {  
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 . 
  optional {?item wdt:P569 ?dob.}
  ?item p:P570 [rdf:type wdno:P570] .}

Try it!

@MB-one:, please take over. I can't.

Hi @Tagishsimon,

whether living people should have a no value statement for date of death (P570) or no statement at all, is currently an undecided issue. A good reason to have the statement is data completeness and that in this way we have recorded the fact, that said person is indeed currently living, because they haven't died at the time when the statement was made. Not to have any statement can lead to the confusion whether the person is currently living or the date of their death just has not been recorded in Wikidata yet. That means less confidence in the actual status from the data at hand. On the other hand reasons against the statement could be, that some living people, who have Wikidata items could find it creepy, to even have a statement related to their death at all.

If you are interested in this topic, I would suggest that we bring this to the Project chat and discuss it there with the wider community. Until then I guess, we should preserve the status quo, which means, some items have a no value statement and others have no statement at all.

Cheers

Hi @MB-one: The status quo, if the SPARQL query is to be believed , appears to be 77 items with the statement, and ... how many living people have we on wikidata ... without. So I think use of <no value> to denote "is still alive" is an innovation; currently I think we tend to presume that the lack of a date of death indicates living. I don't yet see how or why <no value> improves on the current situation.

The trouble I have with it is that my experience of <no value> tends to be for data which will not ever exist - e.g. the director (P57) value for 1900-1920 films which did not record who directed them, or the publication date (P577) for a film that was cancelled or not released. I have not seen it used to say "we have no data /yet/". And as I indicated above, there are 10s or 100s of properties for which we could say <no value>.

So, yes, maybe we should take it to project chat. Equally, it's no biggie; I was merely that surprised to come across it that I thought it worth discussing. thx.

@MB-one: - Wikidata:Project chat#<no value> in P570 meaning 'is still alive'