I'm pretty sure that nothing like this exists, though I agree that it would
be great to have - not as a substitute for Wikibase's editing UI, but as an
alternate interface, either on
wikidata.org or on some other site that
interfaces with Wikidata.
(One small correction: you wrote "Page Forms (i.e. Semantic MediaWiki)",
but actually there's no direct connection between the two extensions - Page
Forms can also work with the Cargo extension, or by itself.)
I think that all that's needed, conceptually speaking, to enable this sort
of thing is direct storage of the expected "domain" of each property, and
to a lesser extent, its "range" - for instance, that the "capital"
property
applies to countries and states but not TV shows, and that its values are
cities but not trains. This sort of information is already stored pretty
comprehensively in talk pages; see here, for example:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P36
...but I think it would be better to store it as true data, directly on
each page. If that were done, it would be easy, or at least doable, to
create a form on the fly for any Wikidata entity: the form would find all
properties that have this entity in their domain, then display an input for
each one. Property ranges, also known as "allowed values", could then
potentially be used to assist with autocompletion.
Storing domains and ranges could also enable much easier *querying*
interfaces - using a very similar approach, an interface could display just
the properties that users are most likely to want to query on for any
"class" of entities.
I've raised this idea before with Wikidata developers, by the way, and the
response I tend to get is that the real world is very complex, so making
official rules of that sort will lead to problems because any rule will
have exceptions. Examples are sometimes brought up like a city that elected
a dog as its mayor or some such. My response is that (a) the exceptions, as
far as I can tell, tend to happen much more in the ranges of properties
than their domains - and ranges are less important, and (b) as long as
rules like these are treated as guidelines only, and users still have a way
to add any data they want to, there's no problem.
-Yaron
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 8:49 PM, Greg S <stuppie(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am interested in running a local instance of
wikibase, but I would like a
custom interface to edit statements. It would be great if I had a form-like
interface, which, once filled out, would generate the statements. This
would be useful for editing data for a specific class of item, that all
have certain properties. In addition, I'd like to restrict possible values
for certain fields and be able to have dropdown menus. Does anything like
this exist? Is there a way to use Page Forms (i.e. Semantic MediaWiki) with
Wikibase? What is the wikidata online editing interface even called?
Thanks
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