This is in my opinion an upstream issue for MediaWiki proper. I do not
think that templates and images from Commons are that different. Take this
image for example:
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Treaty_of_Accession_2011_Ratification_Ma…
It always reflects the current state of ratification.
Take the templates that display the conservation status of species in
Wikipedia. It encodes a whole lot of knowledge about different preservation
status systems, and if they change, this is also not preserved anywhere in
the history.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conservation_status
I agree that this is an issue. But our solution is consistent with the way
it is done in other parts of Wikipedia, and a solution should not be
partially addressing Wikidata but Wikipedia as a whole.
One way would be to great HTML dumps of Wikipedia at regular intervals, as,
e.g., the Internet Archive does it.
A much more thorough discussion of this issue can be found here in a RENDER
deliverable I was co-authoring in 2010:
<http://render-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/D1.1.2.pdf
Cheers,
Denny
2013/4/4 Gregor Hagedorn <g.m.hagedorn(a)gmail.com
> > when templates (or, in the case of wikidata, properties) get deleted or
> renamed.
> > Nobody has come up with a good solution yet.
> I think we did discuss a simple, working
solution: Saving the value
> together with the Wikipedia page.
> The major argument against that was: it is
a waste of storage to
> create a new Wikipedia page (perhaps daily) when property values
> included in a page are changed in Wikidata. I personally value trust
> and documentation of change much higher than disk storage, but even
> then, there are ways to balance this. So perhaps a modified proposal
> that matches the current development stage:
> If an editor saves a page with
{{#property:population}} the parser
> looks up the current value and changes this to:
> {{#property:population|current value=2348732}}
> and stores this wikitext version in the Wikipedia. The same would
> apply to updating, saving {{#property:population|current
> value=2348732}} may result in {{#property:population|current
> value=2348700}} being saved.
> This would mean no additional
"waste" of storage for articles that are
> regularly changed. For those that are not, one could imagine a
> bot-based monthly update check to make past knowledge transparent.
> I realize that this would require a
pattern, where the
> Wikidata-derived values would remain editable on the topic/article
> pages, i.e. the property function would have to be inserted in the
> template call, rather than in the template definition. Those wikidata
> properties automatically called inside templates with a dynamic item
> decided by the current template call would not be preserved. However,
> both editing patterns would be available and it would be up to the
> community of each Wikipedia to choose the preferred one.
> (As I said previously: although similar to
the issue of commons images
> and templates, the issue at stake for Wikidata is different. Because
> of the problems in preserving a transparent editing history, updates
> to commons images are generally restricted to truly minor improvements
> (contrast, cropping, better resolution, etc.). I am not aware of
> cases, where commons images regularly are replaced with updated
> content that is different in substance and thus automatically changes
> all Wikipedia pages, representing different knowledge. I don't want to
> exclude this, but even for changing company logos the usual solution
> is to create a new name, preserving the old logo. Similarly, templates
> may fail to work in old versions (big problem!), but I am not aware
> that a template would render out-of-time information when viewing a
> past revision. Thus, the problem of Wikidata with respect to
> endangering the trust basis of Wikipedia, the version system, is
> related, but different).
> Gregor
>
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