Actually you don't even need to specify which infobox because that can be automated using P1423 ("infobox's main topic") and P1424 ("topic's main infobox"). For instance if an item has "instance of:person", then you can check which infobox is connected to the item Q5 and use that infobox. These properties are still not used widely, but there is no reason not to.

Since Wikidata will be soon its own client, then it is also possible to store (and use) Lua modules on Wikidata and synchronize them across all Wikipedias with a bot. However this is sometimes a bit tricky, since Wikipedias usually like to have their own version. For instance in cawiki the Authority template gives more relevance to Catalan registers and contains translated text.

GerardM also suggested an "article creation wizard" that would first check if the topic exists in Wikidata. If it does, the infobox could be automatically inserted on creation. If it doesn't some basic facts could be asked about the article to create a wikidata item. And based on that data some automatic text could be generated. Magic! :)

Micru

On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

Thanks to David's comment earlier today about editing , I found this page in the Russian Wikipedia:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Universal_infocard

It's a Lua module that shows a person infobox, pulling the data from Wikidata and without giving any parameters in the wiki source code.

This is essentially the fulfillment of Wikidata's promise to make editing articles with infoboxes easier, and it's wonderful. There are more things to do, but I already want to thank everyone involved.

But now the question of cross-wiki synchronization arises. Wikidata.org is cross-wiki by definition. Templates such as {{Universal infocard}} should be cross-wiki as well.

Why? To make translation easier. The article about the Slovak poet Bohuslav Tablic is available in Russian, but not in English. I'd love to translate it to English, but I'll have to use {{Infobox writer}} and fill it manually with data. This is doable, but it would be far more efficient to pull the data from Wikidata. This will become even more acute when the ContentTranslation, and that should happen Some Time Soon. Millions of such articles could be translated, and using Wikidata well will save the translators millions of minutes.

I am not saying that all projects should have the same templates. For example, I am not concerned with the visual design of the templates - this is up to the communities and the designers. But the way in which the data is used should be sync'ed.

What does it entail?
Synchronizing the code of the Lua modules? Can these, maybe, be made into a Lua library that is maintained in MediaWiki source, rather than as on-wiki modules?

Major cross-wiki collaboration in functional specification of data to be used in infoboxes?

What else?

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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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