It’s Wikidata’s third birthday! Wohoo \o/

So it’s finally time to show you, what I worked on over the past weeks and months.

I started working on an extension, called ArticlePlaceholder as part of my Bachelor’s thesis at the HTW Berlin in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland and espacially with the Wikidata team.  

The idea is, to have automatically generated content pages on the different Wikipedias displaying data of items that don’t have an corresponding article in that language.

This is will be especially helpful for smaller Wikipedias with a small contributor base and aims to make more knowledge accessible to more people.

On the long run we even might be able to reduce the number of bot generated stubs. This will mainly support Wikipedia editors in maintaining but also in editing.

I’m very excited to let you know, that there is actually something that I can show you! So instead of telling you in a lot of words, how cool this all is going to be, I want you to just see yourself:

http://articleplaceholder.wmflabs.org/mediawiki/index.php/Special:FancyUnicorn/Q3

This is for example an auto generated placeholder for Ada Lovelace.

It’s all very much work in progress, I just wanted to give you a first sneak peak. :)

So, just in case you wonder, even though Special:FancyUnicorn is an awesome name for a special page I will obviously change it to something more fitting.

Also, the design of the page isn’t done at all yet. So far I just bothered about the loading of the data rather than the layout. I just chose something, that would be easy to read for people familiar with Wikidata for this presentation.

But you know what is actually super cool about the layout? It’s completely written in Lua- so you can overwrite every part of the (upcoming super beautiful default) design and make it fitting to exactly what your local community wants and needs. Only the title and the language links are always set, the rest is adjustable with on wiki scripts. Awesome, right?

There are some other bugs I already know of (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/articleplaceholder/) and probably a lot more I have no idea about yet, so if you find them, feel free to file a bug.

The documentation is not up to date yet either, I will take care of that in the next days. But here is the page anyways: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticlePlaceholder

So have fun discovering the article placeholder! I’m looking forward to your feedback.

And happy birthday Wikidata! I just want to thank you all for the chance to be part of all this awesomeness, all the help and support over the time, and the great work you all do! <3

You rock!

Lucie (Frimelle)

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de

Imagine a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. 
That‘s our commitment.

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