When a cell goes through the reconciliation process, some additional data is created in a property of the cell:
cell.recon
This recon object is used to store all the reconciliation information for the cell (see Expressions | OpenRefine for more information)
In general language, I’d use ‘unreconciled’ to mean the cell hasn’t been through the reconciliation process yet. It’s important to differentiate between something that hasn’t been through the process and something that’s been through the process but didn’t find a match - I’d use unreconciled to mean t he former not the latter.
However, when we see the value (unreconciled) in the Judgement Facet for a column it’s more specific - its an assessment of the value of the property:
cell.recon.judgment
If you click the “Change” button at the top right of the Judgement facet you can actually see the GREL being used:
forNonBlank(cell.recon.judgement, v, v, if(isNonBlank(value), "(unreconciled)", "(blank)"))
This expression will return ‘unreconciled’ if the cell itself is not empty (cell.value isNonBlank) but the cell.recon.judgement IS blank.
In this case it looks like a cell that has (in theory at least) been through the reconciliation process is appearing as unreconciled. Looking at the underlying code I can see that this is a deliberate choice of outcome in some circumstances where the reconciliation process fails for some reason behind the scenes. (I’m not suggesting looking at the code but just for reference, this is the relevant code)
The final part of the puzzle is why the reconcilation fails in such a way that we get nothing back from the reconciliation service and that’s definitely a puzzle. I’ve just tried reconciling “BARNEYS NEW YORK” and initially got the same outcome as you describe here. After several attempts it then suddenly worked, and now it reconciles consistently. Which sounds similar to @DrThneed’s experience with their data.
I think there are two things (on the development side) it would be good to do as a result of this question:
- Consider changing the behaviour on unsuccessful reconciliation to be clearer to the user what has happened here
- Investigate what is causing the underlying issue of the reconciliation failing from Wikidata