Hi all, I'm wondering about one usage Wikidata could be useful to
Wikipedias : Redlinks subject identification.
Wikidata is good to identify subjects. Redlinks are used in Wikipedias to
identify subjects with currently no article.
I post here because I think there is something to integrate this further,
but I don't know exactly what.
A quick review about the current mechanisms we have to link items and/or
articles and subjects together :
* Wikidata interwikis. This works well. Links an item to articles and
articles titles
* articles redirect. This also works well, now we have a mechanism to link
article redirects with items, which is cool.
* There is currently templates like
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6519884
or
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15977575 Interesting mechanisms actually
* Wikidata items aliases : links a set of lexemes to an item
* Special:ItemByTitle and Special:GoToLinkedPage which are great, I don't
know how much they are used in practice though
A little bit different but close
* items redirects
This seems this covers a lot of the user usecases. Yet there is a lot of
red links in Wikipedia with actually no links to a Wikidata item.
My feeling is that what actually lacks in this picture is that the
templates are a bit hackish and that a deeper integration of item numbers
with redlinks would allow to go further and encourage users to make the
links at an earlier stage. What about a Wikisyntax to put an item number
into a Wikilink or a visual editor integration to suggest an entity every
time a user wants to enter a redlink ?
This seems a low hanging fruit for WIkidata development and could make
Wikidata more real to Wikipedia communities. Especially compared to doing
this at the community level where this would require a big maintenance
effort and community knowledge about the templates to make the link
beetween the red label and the corresponding item concrete, especially if
visual editor make the information come to eveyone.
One other solution could be to allow to associate items to yet non existing
articles to "reserve" them, allow redlinks into the Wikidata interwiki list
?