On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 12:36 PM, Joe Filceolaire <filceolaire@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that it makes sense that one of the first things to do when creating a new wikipedia article should be to create an infobox which is automagically linked to the creation of a wikidata item. There are a number of considerations related to this.

1. Notability. The current rules for Wikidata means that it is not acceptable to create a wikidata item until after the Wikipedia article has been created.

Most of the time superseded by "clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity" or "structural need", but nevertheless important.

2. Drafts. English Wikipedia has recently enabled a Draft name space for people to use to develop new articles. Articles in the Draft namespace are not indexed by Google and are not required to meet notability standards until they are transferred to the Main namespace. Should we change the rules on wikidata so Draft articles can be sitelinked and have wikidata items?

No idea how useful drafts are... or how often they move forward or get deleted.

3. Visual Editor. The visual editor already has some template editing functionality but it does not link to a wikidata item. To get Wikipedia editors editing wikidata we need an infobox creation wizard which will mean wikipedia editors can edit wikidata from inside wikipedia and it feels like they are editing an info box. Personally I think the first step should be to enable the wikibase client on wikidata so we can start developing these internationalised and localised infoboxes on wikidata which can then be redeployed to other WMF wikis.

Totally agree. Even better would be to have a "Infobox Reasonator", meaning a standard infobox that can be used for everything (perfect for small wikis). But for all that first we need Lua for testing the templates on WD:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47071

Which needs arbitrary access: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47930

And perhaps linking Wikidata pages as sitelinks, so Wikipedias can find our custom-made infoboxes easily
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55570

As for WP-templates there is the need to be able to specify to which WD property should a template field default. No idea if that has been tracked/discussed somewhere.

Coming back to the topic of new articles, I think it is important to note that most articles are categorized, and categories can give a hint about the properties common to all articles belonging to the category. It should be possible to semi-automate the process of creating wikidata items with an initial set of statements depending on the item category. Infoboxes also give hints about base statements.

Thanks

Micru