Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Move citations to Wikidata

Random proposal ►◄ Archive The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Move citations to Wikidata

N Needs consensus / no engineering necessary

Problem: Many citations are incomplete, tend to be outdated and/or have invalid URLs etc. They must be maintained in each and every language version redundantly. Actually, citations are metadata which can be maintained at Wikidata much more easily than in different language versions and used universally by recognising key strings like URL, ISBN, ISSN etc.
Who would benefit: Each and every editor in each and every Wikimedia project. InternetArchiveBot would have to work only on Wikidata.
Proposed solution: Move citations to Wikidata, ensure by means of software that users edit their citations on Wikidata and that those diminish from articles' source text.
More comments: (Feel free to translate my proposal into better English.)
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Matthiasb (talk) 21:05, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

@Matthiasb: Thanks for your proposal! The big part of this is to get community acceptance for having citation data not in the wikitext. On English Wikipedia I think this is a contentious topic (there does exist the {{CiteQ}} template, which does what you want), although on other wikis it might be more acceptable. The second part of this is about the actual form of these citations, and that feels like a wiki's responsibility (there are existing templates that can be copied). So I think the only part of this that would require input from developers is some way of making it easier to edit the citations in a wiki and Wikidata at the same time; maybe you could focus on that aspect of it for this proposal? —Sam Wilson 01:10, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Matthiasb: Thanks also for this nice proposal! I see two main merits in your proposal:

It allows to separate the references from the body of the page text where references often clutter the text and make very difficult to read and to understand the text code for locating easily where to make some modifications. It is an old problem of Wikipedia: clearly separating the references from the text!
It allows to share references between different languages and to centralise all the references in one unique common place where their maintenance and corrections would be much more easy to do. Supplementary advantage: contributors from one language could more easily discover references used in another language.

The references, if correctly formatted in English could serve as international master reference commonly shared between all the Wikipedia sites. In case of need, the master reference could be translated in each language as a function of the needs of each page. I hope this proposal will receive a large support, but I understand that it could also represent a big technical challenge. Shinkolobwe (talk) 17:37, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Would it make sense to put the citations on a separate project (Wikicitations?) instead of of Wikidata? It sounds to me like maintaining citations isn't necessarily the same kind of task as maintaining data values. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 08:37, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Well, citations/references are data. Maintaining them easily is merely a matter of having an appropriate interface. I'm not convinced they need a separate project. Silver hr (talk) 19:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the Wikidata would explode. Dedicated project seems to be a better idea. But even so, this seems like something out of scope for Community Tech team. --Vachovec1 (talk) 19:03, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If you're saying that Wikidata servers would not have enough storage capacity to hold citations/references as well, I have to disagree. More storage can always be added. Silver hr (talk) 19:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Given the major issues with WikiData and there incapability of dealing with vandalism effectively (or at all!) I fully oppose this proposal and I oppose any idea that we should host citations elsewhere (I'd only support if vandalism detection there was as good as EN which is a very big wish I know!). –Davey2010^Talk 19:39, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Protecting against vandalism is very important, I agree. I think the focus should be on that, with an eye toward implementing this proposal when vandalism is under control. Silver hr (talk) 19:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is an excellent idea that would make dealing with references and citations much easier and thus enable more and better contributions to Wikipedia. Silver hr (talk) 19:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
We discussed this as a team and it sounds like this needs broader consensus. There isn't much engineering for us to do anyway, given sourcing from Wikidata is possible now (such as with {{CiteQ}}). As such I'm going to archive this. Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 03:59, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]