Grants:IdeaLab/Improve links and redlinks in projects

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Improve links and redlinks in projects

Many wiki links point to the wrong article. The article is often not what the link suggests. Typically all existing articles have Wikidata items and Wikidata has many more items than the number of articles in that project. By linking through Wikidata to other articles, we have a way of checking the links. When every wiki link uses Wikidata, we can improve our content and do away with disambiguation in links.

idea creator• GerardM

this project needs...

volunteer

created on17:58, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

When an article gets written, the linking articles are often not there Disambiguation is used as a stop gap. Sometimes an article exists but it is the wrong article that is linked to.

What is your solution?

Wikidata has links for almost every article. When every article in a disambiguation page is a known Wikidata item, links to the disambiguation page may be automatically be resolved when an article is written. When a red link links to a Wikidata item, we can provide knowledge in other languages. When links are analysed the likelyhood may be understood that indicates if it is a correct link or not. This is relatively straightforward and it will improve quality in every project including Wikidata.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

I have been involved in Wikimedia for a real long time. First Wikipedia, Commons and Wiktionary now Wikidata. I have been challenged to think about quality lately.

Endorsements

• I've always supported the standardization of red links via wikidata, and I would do the same in this case but I have some problem understanding this specific idea. It is just me probably, but could you please rephrase it? In any case, FYI: disambiguation is not always used as a" stop gap", in some wikipedia there is a great attention to convert links to disambiguation pages to more appropriate red links, reducing the DRDI.--Alexmar983 (talk) 07:01, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
• Rephrasing or giving an example would be helpful, but let me ask if the following are related to your idea.
  • When an article for a particular subject doesn't exist, there could be red links for it in multiple articles but those links might not be the same. For example, before the English Wikipedia article on Charles Edward Stuart was created, there could have been red links to Charles Edward Stuart, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, The Young Pretender, and maybe others, all intended to be the same subject. Once the main article exists, the other links could be created as redirects, but not before because we don't create redirects to nonexistent pages. A while back I spent some time standardizing some red links for this kind of reason.
  • When linking to something that could have many meanings, there is the principle of "least surprise". That means that when there is a primary topic, that topic gets the main name, others must be qualified, and the dab page must include "(disambiguation)" in its name. This can result in incorrect links to the page with the primary meaning. An example of an unqualified title at the main topic on English Wikipedia is San Francisco. There could be links to "San Francisco" that are really meant for an article we don't have yet and those links should therefore be red, but we wouldn't realize that unless we paid close attention.

Is any of that related to what you have in mind here? --Auntof6 (talk)

These are problems users "expert" of connectivity know well, I faced them as well, and yes I had them in mind. I have to stress in any case that the "least surprise" has some degree of ambiguity and we had to create on itWiki specific project to handle these cases in the most collective way. and it was not easy the very first months, but now red links to different pages are "efficiently" standardized due to a good general culture we built on the problem (the second part of your example), but of course the problem of the redirects to one specific non-existing page still exists (the first part of your example). But again, I think I got the problem. i just have problem to see the details or your solution. We discussed many ways to use wikidata to prevent mistakes/back log to propgate, so don't worry if you are very technical.––Alexmar983 (talk) 15:40, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

I've invited some it-N users expert on connectivity to join us.

• "Endorse' One way to fix this is to expand in some way the reports that shows red linked stuff to include more than 1000 like the current one does. Reguyla (talk) 20:00, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

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