> From: g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 22:22:06 +0200
> To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Page history and properties
>
> On 5 April 2013 21:41, Michael Hale <hale.michael.jr@live.com> wrote:
> > Well, I could make a view that shows the diff of a Wikipedia article stacked
> > on top of the diff for the corresponding Wikidata item on my computer in a
> > few minutes. But diffs can be very long sometimes, so there would be a lot
> > of discussion about whether that view is more appropriate than just making
> > it easier to find the link to the Wikidata item on the diff and edit pages
> > for articles that include Wikidata properties. But the work-around you
> > suggest is not a work-around. If the U.S. article currently says: "The
> > population of the U.S. is 309,000,000 people." And I change it to say "The
> > population of the U.S. is {{#property:population|current-value=309000000}}
> > people." Which scenarios does that improve?
>
> It makes changes visible in the present wikitext diff and allows to
> render the past version easily to a correct value. It is not meant as
> a perfect solution to all, but as an option for an editing community
> to enable them to chose between keeping the information visible and
> traceable in the Wikidata diff. I agree about the disadvantages of
> "clutter", but the point is that is does allow a community to choose
> that they don't like clutter and don't need the history and diffs, and
> simple create the property functions inside the templates (with no
> tracking). This would indeed show the changes in the present diff and
> it would allow several years into the future to reasonably understand
> (in wikitext) and render (as html) previous states of wikipedia
> articles several years into the past.
>
> However, better solutions are certainly possible. Based on what you
> write I can imagine an editing workflow diff similar to the stacking
> of diffs, but actually reduced to a link pointing to Wikidata. The
> features I view as important are:
>
> 1. In the history, Wikidata changes for a topic are made visiable
> durign the the display of Wikipedia-Wikitext changes. Ideally multiple
> Wikidata edits could be merged into a single line if no Wikitext
> changes occur in between. There could be options to hide Wikidata
> changes. The "how" is not so important, but I think the present
> watchlist implementation is insufficient, because it generates an
> "attention" message, but makes it hard to follow up (which usually
> occurs in the page history + diff).
>
> 2. In the actual diff, instead of stacking the Wikitext + Wikidata
> property diffs, I could imagine that a solution that at the bottom
> says: "Associated Wikidata properties changed in the choosen period."
> Where choosen period is the period chosen for the diff by the editor
> and where the whole is linked to a Wikidata diff. Present Wikipedia
> communication practice heavily relies on pointing to specific history
> diffs (through links), but currently Wikidata changes are completely
> invisible there. By automatically "linking them in" present practice
> could continue smoothly and non-disruptive.
>
> 3. Ideally, the Wikidata diff link should have option to hide the
> "Wikidata internal" properties like changes in item labels, and should
> show language specific changes only for a specific language, to keep
> the attention of content editors focussed on the relevant changes
> (most likely Wikidata will still show more properties than those used
> on the wikipedia page, but this could be acceptable).
>
> ----
>
> The question of rendering the html for past versions is separate. You
> seem to say that it is already easy to write the #property: function
> such that it takes into account the edit timestamp of a wikipedia page
> version and evaluates the property as it was at that point in time
> (with the current version (ie. when called without a pageid) always
> evaluating to now(), not the last editing timestamp.
>
> ASIDE: I don't worry too much if a property is being referenced by
> name or ID in a past version and has since been deleted, the resulting
> error message is transparent rather than misleading (which the display
> of "wrong" information is).
>
> Gregor
>
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