Wikibase tools & messaging - Wikibase Community User Group

17 Aug 2021

Hello everyone,

The Wikibase development team is excited to see the emergence of
community-created import tooling such as RaiseWikibase and wikibase-insert,
particularly because Wikibase does not yet come equipped with its own
import mechanism “out of the box”. To help better support the community, we
would like to offer some advice to toolmakers and provide some insight into
our planned explorations into making API-based importing better and faster.

We anticipate an inherent issue with tools that directly inject information
into the Wikibase database tables. Namely, that the schemas that such tools
rely on are subject to change. Normal development processes across
Wikimedia can (and likely will) endanger the long-term health and stability
of these tools, an outcome we would like to avoid as much as possible.
Specifically, we can’t guarantee that the layout or content of the tables
that these tools write to will not change. Although Wikibase does not have
its own public stable interface policy, we work with an eye on Wikidata's
policy
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Stable_Interface_Policy#Unstable_Interfaces>
.

We would like to offer the following advice to tool developers:

   1.

   Wherever possible, use the HTTP APIs.
   2.

   When using them, make sure to batch requests when possible.
   3.

   Understand that by reading or writing directly to DB tables, Wikibase
   behavior may end up broken in subtle ways.
   4.

   Understand that tools which read or write from the DB on today’s
   Wikibase may not still work on tomorrow’s Wikibase.

The Wikibase development roadmap
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Development_plan#Wikibase_ecosystem>
for the year is already tightly booked. However, Wikimedia Germany intends
to dedicate some resources during our next 2021 prototyping effort towards
exploring ways to optimize our API -- specifically, a solution approaching
something like an "import mode" which would bypass unnecessary actions when
inserting a body of previously vetted information. This might, for example,
include ignoring checks on the uniqueness of labels or user permissions. In
addition, we plan to dedicate time toward evaluating OpenRefine’s new Wikibase
reconciliation functionality
<https://docs.openrefine.org/next/manual/wikibase/overview> on behalf of
the community.  We will keep you updated on our efforts related to these
topics.

If you are interested, we welcome you to watch the progress of these
related Phabricator tickets as well:

   -

   https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T287164  -- Improve bulk import via API
   -

   https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285987 -- Do not generate full html
   parser output at the end of Wikibase edit requests

Cheers,

-- 
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager for Wikidata/Wikibase*

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de

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