Wikidata:Property proposal/subpopulation 2

subpopulation

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Place

   Not done

Description	partial population according to some criteria
Represents	sub-population (Q2311577)
Data type	Number (not available yet)
Domain	place
Allowed values	integer
Example 1	Pristina (Q25270) → 426; point in time (P585) → 1961; ethnic group (P172) → Macedonians (Q2436423)
Example 2	See below for alternatives
Example 3	MISSING

Motivation

This is a proposed solution of Wikidata:Project_chat#Something_wrong_here?. Previous proposals:

• Wikidata:Property proposal/Number by nationality, religion and gender (December 2017)
• Wikidata:Property proposal/subpopulation (January 2018)

I think this is better than the following alternatives:

• Use has part(s) (P527) with qualifier population (P1082) - this may be confused with other meaning of has part(s) (P527)
• Use has part(s) of the class (P2670) - one may argue population is actually not "part" of city
• Use e.g. Pristina (Q25270) → subpopulation property → Albanians (Q179248) → quantity (P1114) → 194,452 and Pristina (Q25270) → subpopulation property → Orthodox Christian item → quantity (P1114) → 480 - this will only be able to filter by one criterion, and can not express things such as "male Christian population"
• Use population (P1082) with qualifier - may confuse data consumers as thay may think the value is full population. In RDF trusty statements qualifiers are stripped
• Use ethnic group (P172), religion or worldview (P140) etc. with qualifier population (P1082) - 1. not able to filter by multiple criteria; 2. it will be awkward to say the population is 0

For qualifiers:

• Use ethnic group (P172), religion or worldview (P140), sex or gender (P21) etc. - my proposal, but not all quality have such property (e.g. we don't have a property "literacy")
• Use applies to part (P518) - if we use two applies to part (P518) qualifiers, it's unclear that the statement means "and" or "or"
• Use specific property with fallback to applies to part (P518) as general one

-- GZWDer (talk) 22:39, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support --SilentSpike (talk) 22:45, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
•  Weak support I guess this is ok, but I'm a little sad we can't use population (P1082) with qualifiers. I understand the reasoning, but it seems to me it applies to many other cases too, and maybe our data consumers should get a little smarter about checking for qualifiers. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:24, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
•  Question Could you include a qualifier to determine how the subcategory is done? e.g. criterion used (P1013)=eye color. Supposedly, people could add multiple sub-populations for the same date that aren't meant to add up. BTW, we already have male population (P1540) and female population (P1539). --- Jura 18:51, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Also literate population (P6499) and literacy rate (P6897). --- Jura 19:00, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

• how about renaming it to "population by ethnic group" Germartin1 (talk) 13:48, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
  •  Support for "population by ethnic group". This could also used for the race data provided by the US Census Bureau and will probably help a lot to import the US census data coming next year. Yellowcard (talk) 14:11, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
  •  Support I agree that "population by ethnic group" would be the most practically useful property as it woul allow us to easily import and store census data from any country.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 13:26, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
• I don't feel qualified to comment on the technicalities, but I very much would support some easier way to be able to represent the racial/ethnic demographics of an entity. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 13:34, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

  Also,  Question: How would this work for entities that aren't regions? E.g. if I want to specify the percentage of female students, first generation students, or international students at MIT? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:06, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

• It looks like the discussion on this has ceased, and there's no explicit objections, and some support. This is probably ready... JesseW (talk) 14:27, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
  • There are still open questions. Obviously  Strong oppose until this is sorted out. --- Jura 16:23, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Sorry, I missed that you had commented on this; I wouldn't have spoken up if I'd noticed. JesseW (talk) 16:28, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
      • It seems as if you don't read (or understand) the discussions. --- Jura 16:39, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
        • It seems as if you can't let your attacks stop. Drop it, please. JesseW (talk) 16:56, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
        • Why did you ignore the alternative proposal by three other users? --- Jura 17:00, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
          • I have already said that your hostile tone, personal attacks and assumption of my bad faith make it impossible for me to participate in discussions with you. I will not be continuing to do so here. JesseW (talk) 17:36, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
            • I don't assume anything. I just observe you marking a proposal as "ready" while there are still open points and proposed change of label. This is comment on your conduct, not an attack on your person. --- Jura 17:59, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
•  Oppose While this data would be very useful, Wikidata isn't very good for storing numerical data. population (P1082) is an edge case yet acceptable, male population (P1540) and female population (P1539) is already a bit over the top. With different criterion used (P1013) that can be used to define population, this is really beginning to cause serious mess in some items. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 08:33, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

  @Vojtěch Dostál: The demographic breakdown of places or other entities is certainly important information about them. I'm not wedded to having to represent that information here (it hasn't worked so well for COVID-19), but if not here, I'd want it to be somewhere on Wikimedia. What's your proposed alternative? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 04:36, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

  @Sdkb: The best option we currently have is Tabular data on Commons. Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 05:43, 7 June 2021 (UTC)

•  Support as "population by ethnic group" Germartin1 (talk) 23:21, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm concerned that the number of claims for subpopulation statements will become huge and difficult to keep track of from a UI and data-consumer perspective.

I'd like to suggest this alternative data model: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Population data model

Let me know what you think on that RFC Lectrician1 (talk) 20:26, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

•  Oppose Even if there is a clear user case, some items about cities and countries are already overloaded with population (P1082) statements. In combination with a large number of aliases for popular items, this causes technical problems when using these items. We need to find some more suitable way to record this type of data (maybe Tabular data on Commons mentioned above by Vojtěch).--Jklamo (talk) 16:28, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

 Oppose I think we should stick with my data model instead and propose "population" and "number of parts" properties. Lectrician1 (talk) 19:27, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Just an update, the proposal for Wikidata:Property proposal/has group that is part of the Wikidata:Requests for comment/Population data model was created. Lectrician1 (talk) 15:33, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

•  Comment I don't think "population by ethnic group" is a good alternative. There are other subpopulations that could be enumerated, such as religious groups, linguistic groups, LGBTQ+ population, and so on. "subpopulation" could be used for any kind of demographic group. UWashPrincipalCataloger (talk) 05:18, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

•  Comment Should this have been marked as ready for creation, when the minimum of three examples is not present in the proposal? UWashPrincipalCataloger (talk) 05:19, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

•  Oppose. I would go as far as to say I am sceptical of the value of this kind of data generally. Ethnicity (and religion? or anything else this is for) is a nebulous concept and many surveys and censuses purposefully exclude it for this reason. Much of the data which do exist are dubious and has been carried out with a political agenda. We currently have a "number of native speakers" property which I find the quality of to be really lacking. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive figures for this for each language, but because people want this information, sources that are as good as guesses have been shoehorned into this property. (The Indian Census does not even have language figures, and the number of Mandarin Chinese speakers in the world differs by several million from one source to another.) --Middle river exports (talk) 02:25, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
• @Middle river exports, UWashPrincipalCataloger, Jklamo, Lectrician1, Vojtěch Dostál:@JesseW, Sdkb, Kiril Simeonovski, Yellowcard, Germartin1, Jura1:  Not done Proposal is open for nearly two years and hasn't found the support needed to create it, discussion is stale. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 17:15, 4 December 2022 (UTC)