Wikidata/Deployment Questions
This page answers some of the common questions that come up during discussions about the deployment of Wikidata on the Wikimedia projects.
General
Why do pages in Wikidata have names like Q123?
Wikidata is a multilingual project. We did not want to give items identifiers in a specific language and thereby favoring that language over all other languages. Therefore items in Wikidata get a number. This number is their unique identifier. However, each item has labels in all possible languages, which usually are just the titles of corresponding Wikipedia pages. They are used on Wikidata for easier searching and more complicated operations.
How do I notice vandalism on Wikidata related to my articles?
Every change on Wikidata which is related to the articles you are watching on your Wikipedia or sister project should appear in your watchlist and in the Recent Changes feed. If you see something improper, please go to Wikidata and correct it.
Phase 1 (language links)
Wikidata was deployed on my project. Can I start removing language links from the articles?
On the left pane of each article, below the list of language links, you have a clickable arrow pointing to Wikidata. If this is the case, you can remove the language links from the article. Do not remove the templates showing featured and good articles. Whether such removal is acceptable, is up to the community of your project.
Please note that some bots will at first re-insert language links that are removed. This issue will solve itself as the bots are updated. If this happens, you might want to send the bot operator a message, encouraging him/her to update his/her bot.
If a link for one language remains in the article, it overrides the link from Wikidata for that language.
What about really complicated link situations? How am I supposed to deal with those now?
It is still possible to define language links in the wiki text as before. So you can just continue like before for these cases.
I created a new page. Should I add language links?
One option is just to add links. There will probably be bots around to add the links to Wikidata. The even better solution: you can go to Wikidata yourself, find the corresponding entry (for instance, using the option "item by title" and searching for the article in one of the languages in which it already existed), and manually add the article you created to the entry.
How do I not show links from Wikidata on a particular page?
In order to hide links coming from Wikidata, put the magic word {{noexternallanglinks}}. If it is used on its own, it will remove all links on that page. This magic word can also be used to remove specific language links, if it is used with parameters. For example, {{noexternallanglinks:fr|id}} will remove French and Indonesian language links.
Phase 2 (infoboxes)
When will this be deployed on my project?
Phase 2 has now been deployed on all Wikipedias. Sister projects are following.
Does using Wikidata mean that the Wikipedia/Wikivoyage/... in my language will be filled by stubs about every single village in the world?
No. Wikidata provides the ability to easily create simple pages with repetitive content, such as population, area and density of villages, but it is up to your community to decide how to use this ability in your project. The pages about the villages would still need to be added — Wikidata has currently no plans to do that automatically.
What happens to existing infoboxes?
They will continue to work as they are. To make use of Wikidata someone needs to change the template and adapt it.
How are we supposed to come to a shared opinion on very controversial topics across the different projects?
You don't have to. Wikidata is able to hold a wide variety of claims and references to support them. The individual communities will be able to decide which of those they prefer in their Wikipedia or sister project. Worst case you will be able to just keep certain values locally as it happens now.
How will we be able to include data from Wikidata in infoboxes?
There are two ways. For trivial things you'll be able to use the inclusion syntax outlined here. For more complex things Lua is available.
Phase 3 (lists)
Does using Wikidata mean that we will have to create list articles? We don't do that in our language
No. Wikidata only provides the possibility to create list articles easily and automatically. You don't have to actually use it. You can use other features of Wikidata, such as central storage of interlanguage links, without using the automatic list creation option.