Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:31, 6 October 2017

This is a draft of a possible 2017 RfC on the use of Wikidata in infoboxes. Please WP:BEBOLD and edit this page. Please make sure that any additions are from a neutral point of view, are focused on providing factual information, and do not try to unduly bias the RfC one way or the other. Please post comments at Wikipedia_talk:Wikidata/2017_State_of_affairs#Draft_RfC_for_Wikidata_in_infoboxes.

Background information

What's Wikidata again?

Wikidata is a Wikimedia project whose objective is to be "a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike...t centralizes access to and management of structured data, such as interwiki references and statistical information." Essentially, it is an editable database.

How are we currently using it?

• Most interwiki links are now provided through Wikidata (although a small number of custom interwiki links remain locally).
• It is used in {{Authority control}}
• A limited number of infoboxes currently use it following Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2

How can we use Wikidata in infoboxes?

• Templates providing wrappers for Wikidata info
• Examples of current Wikidata infoboxes

Where does Wikidata information come from?

• Data is entered by editors and bots. Some bots extract data from Misplaced Pages infoboxes, categories and articles. Each article ("item" in Wikidata terminology) has a corresponding page on Wikidata, where the data resides.
• Imports from other databases

What about references?

• Statement references
• "Stated in"
• "Imported from X Misplaced Pages"

Do we have to use Wikidata infoboxes?

No. No Misplaced Pages project is required to use data from Wikidata anywhere in their project. It is a decision to be made by each editing community. Wikis that decide to use Wikidata can determine how they want to use it. The decision is ours to make. Different options are discussed below.

Why do we need to have an RfC now?

The last RfC on this was held in 2013. A lot has changed since then: Wikidata has grown a lot, and Wikidata infoboxes have gone from the concept stage to the implementation stage. We need to have consensus on what approach to take from now on.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Wikidata/Workflow
• Wikidata Phase 2 with additional links
• Wikidata Data model
• Wikidata Timeplan
• Phase 2 technical proposal at Meta
• Wikidata deployment Q&A at Meta
• Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Wikidata Phase 2

Options for using Wikidata in infoboxes

(Issues such as sourcing probably need to be considered independent of the options above.)

Discussion

!votes

• Option N because ...

Any attempt to vote will be reverted. This is a draft. Options and information may change.

General discussion

• I think that Wikidata should only be allowed to be used when it is sourced, and that the Wikidata reference must included in the reference box, so it is easy to check, and that it must remain possible to override it from Misplaced Pages without leaving your Misplaced Pages edit mode of choice. Overriding it would mean either deleting it in some way, or manually providing an in-Misplaced Pages alternative. A null marker could be used to indicate that a parameter should not be displayed at all in a specific case (for example as the default for religion in BLPs). All editing of Wikidata must be done from in Wikidata, all editing of Misplaced Pages should be done from in Misplaced Pages, and the editor must be clearly aware of which environment they are in at all times. A link from Misplaced Pages edit mode to Wikidata edit mode that opens in a new tab or popup would be good for this purpose, as we don't want people to be confused about which project they are editing at any time. This does not appear to be covered by any of the current options. · · · Peter (Southwood) : 10:43, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
• I think that the present option 4 is a non-starter. I tried that route years ago using Module:Wikidata, but it runs into trouble for two reasons:
  1. Enthusiastic new editors come along and see |year= – which is set to fetch Wikidata – then fill in a value locally, thereby defeating the whole point of importing data (projects-wide updateability/maintainability).
  2. There is now no way of indicating that we never want a value displayed in a particular field in a particular article, apart from messy hidden comments. See the discussion on Template talk:Infobox book #Wikidata, especially the subsection Template talk:Infobox book #Wikidata subsection 1 about ways of using blank or absent parameters suggested by Nikkimaria, and the desirability of disabling |genre= in specific articles, for example, as explained by Sarah at Talk:Night (book)/Archive 2#Infobox 2 --RexxS (talk) 19:21, 6 October 2017 (UTC)
• I think that the present option 3 is unlikely to be a useful choice. See Template talk:Infobox book #Wikidata subsection 1. Is anybody likely to want to go to the effort of adding infobox wikitext like this for every article where they want wikidata to be fetched when there's a simple alternative? --RexxS (talk) 19:31, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

{{Infobox book|<!-- See Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Novels or Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Books -->
| name          = '''Animalia'''
| image         = Animalia (book cover).jpg
| caption       = 
| alt           = Book cover: a larger picture framed by smaller pictures, all of which contain different animals, and title with author at the top
| author        = wikidata
| illustrator   = wikidata
| country       = wikidata
| language      = wikidata
| genre         = wikidata
| publisher     = wikidata
| release_date  = wikidata
| media_type    = wikidata
| pages         = wikidata
| isbn          = wikidata
| oclc          = wikidata
... etc.
}}

• I think ...

• Wikidata