This breaking change is relevant for anyone who consumes Wikidata RDF data
through Special:EntityData (rather than the dumps) without using the “dump”
flavor.
When an Item references other entities (e.g. the statement P31:Q5), the
non-dump (?flavor=dump) RDF output of that Item would include the labels
and descriptions of the referenced entities (e.g. P31 and Q5) in all
languages. That bloats the output drastically and causes performance
issues. See Special:EntityData/Q1337.rdf
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q1337.rdf> as an example.
We will change this so that for referenced entities, only labels and
descriptions in the request language (set e.g. via ?uselang=) and its
fallback languages are included in the response. For the main entity being
requested, labels, descriptions and aliases are still included in all
languages available, of course.
If you don’t actually need this “stub” data of referenced entities at all,
and are only interested in data about the main entity being requested, we
encourage you to use the “dump” flavor instead (include flavor=dump in the
URL parameters). In that case, this change will not affect you at all,
since the dump flavor includes no stub data, regardless of language.
This change is currently available for testing at
test.wikidata.org. It
will be deployed on Wikidata on August 23rd. You are welcome to give us
general feedback by leaving a comment in this ticket
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T285795>.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.
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
Keep up to date! Current news and exciting stories about Wikimedia,
Wikipedia and Free Knowledge in our newsletter (in German): Subscribe now
<https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision!
https://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.