Hi everyone :)

Last year Lucie started working on the ArticlePlaceholder (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticlePlaceholder) in order to fullfill Wikidata's promise of supporting especially the smaller Wikipedias. Today we have rolled it out on the first 4 Wikipedias: Esperanto, Haitian Creole, Neapolitan and Odia. When someone searches for a topic where no local article exists but Wikidata has data we will show an ArticlePlaceholder with this information and encourage the reader to create an article. I hope this will help these Wikipedias by offering their readers more content and by turning more of them into active editors.

In order for the feature to work well we need labels for items and properties in these languages on Wikidata. A lot exist already but if you want to help out you can find items and properties that need labels in these languages at https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-terminator and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ListProperties.

What we rolled out today as usual is a first version. Based on the feedback from those 4 Wikipedias we will expand and improve it. One of the next things we will do is add the option to translate an article from another language if it exists using the Content Translation tool and fix known bugs. Things we know are still broken or need work:
* language fallbacks in the properties are not working so you will see a lot of P1234 and so on until a label is added on Wikidata in that language
* long identifiers break out of the identifier box on the right side and don't look good
* right now you only get an ArticlePlaceholder in the search results when Wikidata has at least 3 links to other Wikimedia projects and 3 statements. We might need to tweak this number still based on feedback from the first Wikipedias. We limit this in order to not encourage readers to create an article that will be deleted right after they created it because it isn't notable.

Here are some example pages:
* Odia: https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AC%AC%E0%AC%BF%E0%AC%B6%E0%AD%87%E0%AC%B7:AboutTopic?entityid=Q131074
* Napolitan: https://nap.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speci%C3%A0le:AboutTopic?entityid=Q2613697
* Esperanto: https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciala%C4%B5o:AboutTopic?entityid=Q12345
* Haitian Creole: https://ht.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:AboutTopic?entityid=Q12345

I'm really excited about making true on one of Wikidata's biggest promises.

Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.

Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.