possible wording for rank: 1) currently most accurate 2) accurate 3) deprecated (or just "wrong")

In usertest, nobody stumbled over this, so far – while in some cases this is important, for many property/values it is not relevant and if users only edit those they never need to think about the (possibly unintuitive) icons.

In T139081#2418936, @Jan_Dittrich wrote:

possible wording for rank: 1) currently most accurate 2) accurate 3) deprecated (or just "wrong")

1. currently valid
2. valid, put (possibly) outdated
3. know to be wrong, but (used to be) commonly believed

Yea, too long...

In T139081#2426539, @daniel wrote:

1. currently valid
2. valid, put (possibly) outdated

Thanks –this is a much clearer wording!

However, I wonder: The standard seems to be 2) "normal". However, let's say "Jaws [directed by] Spielberg" would now be normal, I assume, but it is currently valid and can't outdate (only be wrong if it turns out to be actually directed by his twin brother or so), so should it be 1) "preferred"?

Yea, too long...

Thats a problem that we might be able to solve. Better a long text than one that is not understood.

However, I wonder: The standard seems to be 2) "normal". However, let's say "Jaws [directed by] Spielberg" would now be normal, I assume, but it is currently valid and can't outdate (only be wrong if it turns out to be actually directed by his twin brother or so), so should it be 1) "preferred"?

The distinction between normal and preferred doesn't really apply in such cases. That's why we have the notion of statements having the "default" rank: if there are preferred statements, they are the default. If there are no deferred statements, the normal statements are the default.

Statements with the default rank are the once we use per default in queries and infoboxes.

Basically, the interpretation of the normal rank changes when a preferred statement is present. That's a bit confusing to model nicely, but in practice, it's quite intuitive to work with. I haven't heard any serious complaints about this semantics. Few people know about it explicitly, but few people seem to see anythign wrong with how this behaves.

OK, thats good to know.

What could be an easy-to-implement thing is to put your text in a "title" attribute, so they appear on hover on the setting menu. This is not ideal, since it does not make the reason and mechanism obvious, but it makes it at least more learnable, which would be good.

related: T139356 with its sub-issue T139357

Yeah let's do the title attribute for now.

As a future step let's work on ordering/collapsing based on rank.

Reviewing the suggestions and what we got as suggestions, it seems to be really hard to "fix" 3 states ranks and that it is also not viable to redo the data model.

So to recap: We added titles to give some context of the use of these.

As a viable change that keeps the current structure and makes it more understandable, we could separate "preferred"/ "normal" and "deprecated" from each other. This could mean having a "flag" function (that either is active or not to the user) and a drop-down (of which normal or preferred is chosen) .

Reasoning: Normal and preferred are meaningful values. They might change, though, particularly a "preferred" might be demoted when a new "preferred" comes (See also the title-text of normal: "valid value but possibly historic"). Deprecated is different: It is not a correct value and stays this way, usually.