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Wikidata/Help

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Wikidata is a Wikimedia project to create an open and collaborative database. As of February 2013, the Wikidata project is migrating interlanguage wiki links from individual articles into a central database to ease maintenance.

All Wikipedias can now use interlanguage links stored at Wikidata. For instance, the interlanguage links appearing on the left side of en:Douglas Adams and fr:Douglas Adams come from d:Q42.

In the future, Wikidata will include other kinds of relation data, such as information used in infoboxes.

 
Wikidata, phase 1: Links to all languages from one central point
 
Old system: Interlanguage links between all languages

Each Wikipedia page with an entry in Wikidata uses the language links stored there to populate the language links that show in the left column. Traditional interwiki links in a page's wiki-text are still recognized, and simply override the information for that language (if any) from Wikidata.

If the article is linked to from Wikidata, then it will display all links listed there, in addition to any links entered in the article wiki-text. In the case of a conflict, or intentional difference, between a local link and a Wikidata link for a given language, the local link will be displayed; the Wikidata links for all other languages will still display.

If the article is not yet linked to from Wikidata, then it will display whatever links are in the article wiki-text, as before. In some cases, there may be a Wikidata item that corresponds to the article, but the article on a local Wikipedia has not yet been associated with it. In the course of routine maintenance at Wikidata, these instances will be fixed.

New articles

  • Q1. I've just created an article on XEN; I know there is already an article on the German|French|Swahili Wikipedia on the same subject called XSW. How do I create an Interwiki link?
    Go to XSW. On the left, there should be a list of interwiki links followed by a pen. Click on pen, this will take you to the Wikidata page (item) for XSW. Go to the bottom of the item, click on "add", fill in in the opened cases the language code (en for English) and the name of the article you created (XEN). Then click on "save". You are done.
    If the pen does not show up, go to Wikidata.
    In the main panel (in Vector interface, on the left) locate "Item by title".
    Click on "Item by title".
    On the resulting page, fill in the language code (for example, de for German) and the name of the page on the corresponding Wikipedia (XSW). Then click on Search.
    If the item already exists, go to the bottom of the item, click on "add", fill in in the opened cases the language code (en for English) and the name of the article you created (XEN). Then click on "save". You are done.
    If the item does not exist, create it by clicking on "create the item", filling in its name (XEN) and (preferably) a description of the item. Then add to the item the interlanguage links, as described above.
    If you are planning to add interlanguage links often, you may want to switch on the gadget "slurpInterwiki", available in your Wikidata gadgets. Once the gadget is on, and you are on the item page, click on "Import interwiki" on the menu on the left.
    At least for some time, the old way of adding interlanguage links (just adding them to the Wikipedia pages) will still work, but most likely fewer bots will be checking new articles, and the time until the links propagate to other articles will be longer.

Moved articles

  • Q2. I've just moved an article on YEN to NEY on a local Wikipedia, and all its interwiki links have disappeared. What should I do?
    Go to Wikidata and locate the item for YEN as described in Q1.
    On the item page, find the interwiki link, click on edit, replace YEN with NEY, then save.
    Note that it may take a few minutes before the local page that you moved adjusts to the change. This can be skipped by purging the page.
 
The link to edit the Wikidata page, in grey, on the Vector skin.
  • Q3. I've just noticed that article ZEN is linked to the wrong article XSW on the German|French|Swahili Wikipedia. How do I correct this?
    In the interwiki links section of the article ZEN click on the pen below the interwiki links. This will take you to the Wikidata item for ZEN.
    On the "List of pages linked to this item" section of the item on Wikidata, find the Swahili entry for XSW.
    Click on the "edit" button next to the entry and click "remove".
    Repeat this with other erroneous entries.
    If the pen does not show up on your Wikipedia, the item has not yet been added to Wikidata. Then act as in Q1 above.

More than one interwiki family

  • Q4. I've just noticed that the articles en:YEN, de:YDE and fr:YFR are linked together, and that cs:YCS and hu:YHU are linked together. Actually all five articles are on the same subject. How do I locate and merge their entries on Wikidata?
    You can find their entries as shown in Q1 above – in this case, you could try d:Special:ItemByTitle/en/YEN and d:Special:ItemByTitle/cs/YCS; if those don't work, try searching for all the other Wikipedias' titles, as in some cases it's possible that an item has been created for one title, but not the article it's linked to.
    If you find two items, then remove all the links from one (generally the one with the higher Q number, but it's okay to use the other one if it has many fewer linked articles), add them to the second one, and request deletion of the now empty item.
    If you find one item, simply add the links to the relevant articles.
    If you find no items, then just create an item for all five articles, as explained in Q1 above.
  • Q5. In the article which has its Wikidata entry, and the links were removed by the bot longtime ago, someone added a Swahili interwiki link. What should I do?
    Check that the Swahili article exists and is on the same topic;
    If it does, consider it as a request to add the Swahili link to Wikidata, act as in Q1.
    If it does not exist, delete the link.

Persistent conflicts

Local interlanguage links in Wikipedia pages can be safely removed if the local list and the Wikidata list match. Understand that unexplained removal of interlanguage links could appear to be vandalism. To avoid being reverted, leave an edit summary when removing local links, preferably linking to this page.

In general, it is best to remove interwiki links in Wikipedia articles once they are associated with Wikidata. (You can tell that the page is "associated" with Wikidata by the presence of the "Edit links" text below the language list.) This is because whatever interwiki links are left over will always override the more current information that Wikidata endeavors to provide. Page sizes also decrease noticeably when long lists of interwikis are removed. However, you should not remove links if you have not verified that they have been copied to Wikidata. This task is now done by a bot (Addbot), so you don't need to do this manually on most pages.

Bot operators using the pywiki framework should upgrade to a minimum of pyrev:11073. Bot operators using bots editing interwikis using other frameworks or methods should stop running their bot until they have fixed their code to avoid changing interwikis. See w:Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard/Archive 8#Wikidata..

Below are methods which can be used to change the links in a more automatic fashion, which decreases the chance that you will make an error while transferring the links:

  • You may want to add the following JavaScript to your common.js page on your home Wikipedia, which will allow you, when editing a page, to click a "remove interwikis" button, which will remove all interlanguage links that have been copied to Wikidata:
mw.loader.load('//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Yair_rand/checksitelinks.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
 
To use Checksitelinks (once installed), click to edit an article, then go to the dropdown menu. (In the MonoBook skin, the tab simply appears at the top of the page, to the right of "unwatch".)
 
A screenshot of the slurpInterwiki interface. The button to initiate it, "Import interwiki", can be seen in the bottom left corner of the screen, along with several other gadget-generated buttons.
  • slurpInterwiki is a Wikidata gadget which can be used to semi-automatically pull in new links from the article. See the Wikidata gadgets panel.

The following method is the basic way to edit an interlanguage link:

  1. Go to the Wikidata item. There are two manual methods to do this:
    • Click the grey "edit links" link at the bottom of the "Languages" bar
    • Go to d:Special:ItemByTitle and search for your page
  2. Compare the links with the article's
  3. Edit the links in Wikidata. This should be straightforward; each interlanguage wiki link has an [edit] next to it. Click that link exposes several forms:
    • The first is for the language code
    • The second is for the languages' link
    • Where the [edit] link was should now appear three options: save, remove, and cancel.
      • Save is used when you have completely finished changing the information in the entry
      • Remove completely removes the entry from the database
      • Cancel cancels the interaction with the interface
  4. Add any missing links in Wikidata if appropriate. This can be done by going to the bottom of the interlanguage wiki link list and clicking on "add link". This exposes mostly the same forms as a normal edit.
  5. Once all links are accounted for, preview a version of the article on Wikipedia with all interlanguage links removed, and compare it to the current version of the article. Look to see if there are any differences between the rendered text. If there are not, they may be removed safely. If there are differences, you should either not remove the links that differ, or, better yet, return to editing Wikidata, and then remove them from the article.

If you encounter any interwiki conflicts (most notably situations where you get an error message informing you that a link you've tried to add is already in use on another item), you can raise the issue at w:Wikipedia talk:Wikidata#Interwiki conflicts or d:Wikidata:Interwiki conflicts, though if you can think of a way to resolve it yourself, by all means please do.

If you run into any confusion in the process of transferring links from Wikipedia to Wikidata, feel free to drop by at d:Wikidata:Project Chat or ask for advice on IRC at #wikimedia-wikidataconnect. You may also see the ""Any questions?" section below for more help.

Article status indicators

Good Articles and Featured Articles on other Wikipedias are indicated by a star beside the language link. This star is generated by a template. Since Wikidata does not store this information, these templates should not be removed. The corresponding language link itself may be removed.

Sometimes an interlanguage link includes an anchor, which is a link to a section of an article. The anchor is represented by the "#" character (e.g. [[fr:Analyse de survie#Fonction de survie]]). Such a link is used when the linked Wikipedia does not have an exactly corresponding article, but has an article that deals in part with the same subject. Wikidata's language links do not support anchors by design, so language links with anchors must be retained on Wikipedia if desired. For an example, see the end of the wikitext in the article w:Survival function: Wikidata is providing all of the language links—via d:Q2915096—except for the one to the French Wikipedia, which, since it is a section link, is instead listed locally in the article itself.

An individual article can completely suppress Wikidata links by using the {{noexternallanglinks}} magic word. The magic word also supports suppression of only specific languages, in the form "{{noexternallanglinks:es|fr|it}}", which would suppress the Spanish, French, and Italian links.

The Wikidata community agreed in an RFC that all namespaces of Wikipedia projects other than "User" are eligible for storage on Wikidata. This means that interwiki links for categories, templates, and Wikipedia policy pages can also be stored in Wikidata and removed locally if effected by both communities. For an example of a Wikidata item referring to the Wikipedia namespace, see item Q4167836, which refers to w:Wikipedia:Categories.

Inline interlanguage links (those of the format [[:<language>:<article>]]) continue to work as before and have not been changed by Wikidata. For instance, you can link the German version of this information page without in any way affecting its interlanguage links, here or on Wikidata. (Just remember to start with a colon!)

Recent changes

Changes on Wikidata that relate to articles on this Wikipedia will show up in Recent Changes if the option is enabled by the user. See Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc.

Infoboxes (Phase 2)

Wikidata aims to hold information in many languages that can eventually be re-used on Wikipedias, particularly in infoboxes. The choice to use this information is left entirely to the Wikipedia community itself—future changes to the wiki software will only provide an option to retrieve information from Wikidata if desired. (For example, some wiki-text may ask for the atomic number of a chemical element, or the population of a country.) Wikidata will support citations for all data. This phase of the Wikidata project is a large one, and is still in development.

It is envisaged that articles will be able to incorporate facts from the corresponding Wikidata page using a {{#property:}} syntax, described at Wikidata/Notes/Inclusion syntax. Such transclusions will have to be added inline to articles explicitly on a page-by-page or template-by-template basis, either manually or by bots, and will not be attached automatically to articles in the way that Phase 1 interwiki links are.

Any questions?

If you still have questions, or you would like some assistance from a user who speaks your language, you may try reading the links on the Main Page of Wikidata, especially the introduction, Help:Contents, the FAQ, and the glossary. If you would like to ask someone, you may go to the "project chat" in your language, and ask there. More technical questions can be asked on the "Contact the development team" page.

You may also visit #wikidataconnect on IRC (freenode) for help. Note that the channel is publicly logged.

Below is a list of users who are willing to help, listed along with the languages they speak and the list of wikis on which they are admins.

Ambassadors for Wikidata
Username IRC nick Languages spoken Admin on
Ajraddatz ajr en-ca, fr-1 Wikidata
Dan Koehl DanKoehl sv, en-3, de-2, da-1, nb-1, nn-1 Wikispecies, Wikvoyage (Swedish)
Kaioduarte-TB kaioduarte pt-3, pt-BR-3
Esteban16 Esteban16 es, en-2, pt-1, it-1 Wikidata
FlyingAce FlyingAce es, en-5, de-1, it-1 Wikidata
Harmonia Amanda Harmonia_Amanda fr, en-2, es-2 Wikidata, Wikipédia francophone
HakanIST HakanIST tr, en-4, az-3, es-2, de-1 Wikidata, Turkish Wikipedia, Steward
Jon Harald Søby Jhs nb, en-4, nn-3, sv-3, da-2, de-2, sw-2, eo-1, es-1, ro-1 Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia
koavf koavf en, es-2, de-1, pt-1 Wikidata, English Wikiquote, English Wiktionary, multilingual Wikisource, outreach, species, test projects
Legoktm Legoktm en, es-1, gu-1 MediaWiki.org, English Wikipedia
MisterSynergy MisterSynergy de-N, en-4 Wikidata
Mohammed Qays ar Wikidata, Arabic Wikipedia
Moheen Reeyad #MoheenReeyadconnect bn-N, as-1, bpy-1, en-3, hi-1, hif-1 Bengali Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
PinkAmpersand PinkAmpersand (find me on #PinkAmpersandconnect) en, fr-3, es-1, it-1
Ricordisamoa it, en-2
Rschen7754 Rschen7754 en, es-2 Wikidata, English Wikipedia
Sjoerddebruin sjoerddebruin nl, en-3, de-1, fr-1 Wikidata, Dutch Wikipedia
Viswaprabha ml, en-3, hi-3, ta-2, sa-2,ar-1,ur-1 Malayalam Wikipedia, Malayalam Wiktionary
wd-Ryan en Wikidata
Yahya Yahya bn, en-2 Wikidata, Bangla Wikipedia, Bangla Wikivoyage
Aminwa 21 Aminwa 21 en
S8321414 zh-Hant-TW, nan-3, en-2, lzh-2 Wikidata, Chinese Wikivoyage
WikiBayer bar, de4 Wikidata, Bavarian Wikipedia, metawiki, Global Sysop


See also

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