Hi!
In RDF exports of Wikidata[1] and in Wikidata Query Service, sitelinks
were always encoded by url-encoding the sitelink text - i.e. link to
"Category:Stuffed animals" were encoded as
/wiki/Category%3AStuffed%20animals.
While this encoding produces a working link, after some time we've
arrived to a conclusion that such encoding is very inconvenient, due to
mismatch with how titles are encoded in Mediawiki, and this mismatch
makes it harder to look up the links. See more in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131960
We have decided to change the encoding, so that the encoding of the
sitelink above would be /wiki/Category:Stuffed_animals. The encoding now
should match how titles are encoded in Mediawiki codebase (non-ASCII
characters that Mediawiki encodes will still be encoded as before).
Implementation of this change will require database reload, and during
that time there might be inconsistent results returned for some time
(some entities may have new sitelink encoding and some the old one). I
apologize in advance for any inconvenience caused by that. I will
announce additionally when the switch is process has started and when it
is complete.
Thanks,
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/Indexing/RDF_Dump_Format
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org