(This announcement is relevant for all Wikidata users working with Labels and Aliases.)

Hello,

We're excited to invite you to participate in the community testing of the “default values for labels and aliases” feature. Based on a long-standing community request around language fallback (T285156), and based on your feedback from our previous announcement, we are currently testing this feature on https://test.wikidata.org with the release planned for Q1 2024.

What is coming?

Default values for labels and aliases (mul): Items that repeat the same label and aliases over and over are hard to maintain and can strain our infrastructure, especially the Wikidata Query Service. As a solution, we are introducing the option for default values in the termbox. The default values are considered in the language fallback chain (language code “mul”).

Visualisation of the language fallback chain: Previously, Wikidata’s fallback chain was not visible in the user interface, making it challenging to determine if additional information was needed. As a first step toward improvement, we will now clearly show what content is already available via language fallback in the placeholders for labels (including default values).

We need your feedback

Please leave your feedback on Help talk:Default values for labels and aliases. Your feedback will play a crucial role in verifying if the current version is ready for Wikidata. Additionally, you can find some test Items, known limitations and open questions there for you to review. We will analyze your feedback one week after today's announcement.

The next steps

After you have left your feedback, please make sure that the guidelines on Help:Default values for labels and aliases are ready for the launch. You can also already plan bot-runs for mul, but please be sure to start with uncontroversial cases. If there are no blockers, we will then prepare a limited release on Wikidata in the coming weeks. The limited release will only be visible if you put mul in your Babel boxes. We will use this limited release to test the performance and verify that everything works as planned. Please don’t start any bot-runs for mul during the limited release. A full release will follow a few weeks later, displaying default values for everyone by default, and featuring an onboarding element that will guide people to the help page. Bot-runs for mul can commence at this stage.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions or concerns in the talk page of the help page and for technical details in this Phabricator ticket (T356169).

Thank you for your support!

Cheers,

Mohammed Sadat Abdulai
Community Communications Manager, Wikidata

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0) 30 577 116 2466
https://wikimedia.de

Grab a spot in my calendar for a chat: calendly.com/masssly.

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