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Celtic Knot Conference 2020/Submissions/Wikidata-powered infoboxes/Discussions

< Celtic Knot Conference 2020 | Submissions/Wikidata-powered infoboxes

Welcome to the note-taking pad of one of the Celtic Knot Conference 2020 sessions! This space is dedicated to collaborative note-taking, comments and questions to the speaker(s). You can edit this document directly, and use the chat feature in the bottom-side corner.

✨⏯️ Session details

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💬❓ Questions

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Feel free to add questions here, while or after watching the session. Please add your (user)name in bracket after the question. The host of the session will pick a few questions to ask them during the livestream. The speaker or other participants will answer on this pad (asynchronously: the answer may come in a few hours or days).


  • (@Luistxo, Basque wikipedian) I dream with a kind of WYSIWYG editor/creator of infoboxes. Would that be posible?
    • Rebecca (User:Smirkybec): What is WYSIWYG, so I can ask the question at the end :)
      • WYSIWYG = What you see is what you get. Like, the wikitext (source) editor is not WYSIWYG, but Visual Editor is WYSIWYG.
      • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
        • Thank you!
      • I think the Wikidata Bridge will help with this - you can edit the Wikidata content in the local wiki, and presumably then preview it at least to see what it would look like.
  • Amir (User:Amire80): I am promoting the idea of Global templates and modules ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Discuss ). I see that your Module:Wikidades is somewhat different from the corresponding module in other languages. So, question: Can you imagine that this code will become common to all wikis? If so, will there be any local changes that you'd still want to make?
    • ...and why was Mòdul:Wikidades forked from Module:Wikidata?
      • There's language-specific effort involved at the time. There is an idea to use global templates now, which has started being implemented.
  • Was there much resistance to this change in the ca.Wikipedia community? If so, how did you overcome it?
    • English wikipedia resistance - there has been concern at English Wikipedia about the lack of references at Wikidata. There is a fear of loss of control over content where "vandalism" can propagate in an opaque way. they are accustomed to hand building the Ferrari, rather than mass producing Fords. and manual maintenance is a problem
    • I forked Module:Wikidata on the enwiki to Module:WikidataIB because I needed to allay concerns over sourcing of information ataken from Wikidata. We also needed a mechanism to ensure that the fetching of Wikidata could be designed to be enabled on an article-by-article basis.
      • What does IB stand for? InfoBox
        • Thanks!
    • While the English Wikipedia can be reluctant, smaller languages don't have the luxury to decline Wikidata-provided effort. Most Wikipedias are smaller than Catalan is, for example, so the Wikidata-sourced infoboxes can be very helpful to the majority of Wikipedia instances.
  • Getting more Wikidata-powered infoboxes on enwp really needs more people involved - there's not enough people currently using them to get a critical mass in the community that will help get them accepted. So if you write articles about people/telescopes/other things that already have Wikidata-powered infobox options, please use them! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Infobox_templates_using_Wikidata
    • Yes, it will require a culture change, with trust building. but reversion of Wikidata infoxboxes will continue until then.
  • Has anyone quantified the labour-effort involved in implementing and saved by using Wikidata?
    • Before the pandemic, the idea was to make this a hands-on workshop, so that we could instruct people in doing so in this session. We have done so before, though, with the Irish Wikipedia; it took around 2 hours of work from a handful of people to get 10–20 templates set up.
    • A large concern for small-language Wikipedias has been having language creep on their Wikipedia, where English (or other dominant languages) seeping in from Wikidata, where the smaller language doesn't have a label in Wikidata. Thankfully, adding labels in Wikidata solves that problem.
  • Have you noticed any shift in labour as a result of moving to Wikidata-backed infoboxes?

Pau would like to say yes, but it's difficult to quantify and there is always more work to be done on any Wikipedia instance.

If you have further questions, don't forget the Wikidata help desk Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Wikidata_helpdesk and you can leave questions on Pau's talk: page: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuari_Discussi%C3%B3:Paucabot

🖊️🔗 Collaborative note-taking

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Feel free to take notes about the session here, add some useful links, etc.

  • The Catalan Wikipedia uses infoboxes fetching directly from Wikidata. (There are a lot of links in the slides doc, linked above)
  • From structured data, you can create rich graphs from querying the datasource.
  • Infoboxes are the box on the right-hand side (on the left in r-to-l scripts such as Arabic) of many articles on Wikipedia instances that show key details about the article subject.
  • The Catalan wikipedia has 650k articles and 1300 active users; they are in the top 20 of Wikipedia languages by [something]. 82% of articles on cawiki have infoboxes, mainly on people and locations. cawiki is the 4th most-connected Wikipedia to Wikidata.
  • Every infobox has a colour-coded titlebar, with an icon, according to which category of information the article covers.
  • These infoboxes are put together using Lua and wiki-syntax: ca:Mòdul:Wikidades (Q86580938), which was originally the same as Module:Wikidata but has forked from there (and the fork is used in 16 other languages). There is also ca:Mòdul:Infobox (Q13107716) and ca:Plantilla:Infobox (Q5626735)
  • In December 2014, it was noted that there were 300+ different infoboxes that have since been deprecated in favour of 80 Wikidata-powered infoboxes, for example merging Infobox football player and Infobox monarch (and so on) into a single infobox for all biographies.
  • Some of these infoboxes are quite complex, with up to 100 parameters imported by a single box, for example a taxobox would fetch the entire taxonomic tree.
  • This simplified content entry in the wiki-code substantially, removing all the parameters that were previously included into the Template:Infotaula de persona call
  • So this is a great simplification, but at what cost?
  • There were many infoboxes each calling ca:Plantilla:Infobox, with many parameters. The values then could all be substituted with something like {{#invoke:Wikidata | claim | property=P31 | value={{{type|}}} }}, allowing the old parameter method to be used by editors if data was missing from Wikidata import.
  • A lot of properties are imported from Wikidata for each taxobox [see slide]
  • Pro and cons
    • Pro
      • Easy to add the infobox
      • Help standadize articles
      • Take advantages of Wikidata
      • also really helps improve Wikidata data — if an editor sees an infobox on an article that has very little data in it, it is easy to go over to Wikidata and populate the data there, benefitting Wikipedias of all languages.
    • Cons
      • There is (some) technical work to create them (starting investement), people can help you
      • Some parameters are not handled or not yet converted
      • Some tweaking needed for natural language (plural, feminine forms, etc.)
  • Next steps
    • situation on English Wikipedia
    • more wikidata-powered infobox
    • getting cross-wiki infoboxes (and templates in general)
  • Work in progress now on ca.wp
      • "same code in every wiki" project
      • translations in WD
      • synchronised improvments
      • info, sample and help [links]
  • Preparing for Wikidata Bridge \o/ [Link for templates or modules?]
  • Small wiki toolkits — see yesterday very interresting presentations: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/CKC2020-Starter-Kit
  • Global templates!! share templates across wikis


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