Hi devs,
recently I had a discussion on IRC on how badges for site links should
work. After some time I realized that there is a general design issue
with their implementation.
The original idea of badges is to replace the FA/GA templates on
Wikipedias. This makes sense as it is centralized data which is used in
every Wikipedia. On Wikidata we can place that the article about XXX on
enwiki is a good/featured article and this will be shown on every
Wikipedia having a corresponding article. So basically, we are just
removing the {{Link GA|en}} or {{Link FA|en}} template and adding this
information to Wikidata. You can see that this is the last step away
from the old interwiki system.
However, there are proposals to badges that go far beyond this original
idea. Even the yet written implementation has such issues. As everybody
will easily understand, an article can be either ga or fa or none.
However, it cannot be ga *and* fa together. Thus one sitelink should
only be connected to a maximum of one badge. In contrast, the
implementation allows more than one badge, even worse, it allows an
infinite number of badges. Other proposals want badges to support
templates concerning meta information of the local article. However,
this information do really *not* concern other Wikipedias. Or can you
imagine a Wikipedia that wants to display a "this article needs sources"
icon next to the (probably not existing) fa icon? This example makes
clear that such meta information that has no value to another Wikipedia
than itself should not be stored on Wikidata, too. Wikidata is a place
for central data, not any data. For the Wikipedias' internal meta
information the working categories work really fine today and there is
no reason to force this system into Wikidata without any benefit to
Wikidata or the Wikipedias themselves.
So finally, my proposal is to only support one badge per sitelink. And
also to only support badges that make sense to have at a central point
and that will be used by more than one Wikipedia. I think this makes the
ui easier to understand and the code not relying on super-huge config
list showing all possible meta information that could be stored as
badges resulting in another huge statement system, but even worse.
Please keep this concerns in mind when deciding how the badges should work.
Best regards,
Bene*