Hello all,
We’ve been working on a new data type that allows you to link to the *geographical shapes* that are now stored on Commons. This data type will be deployed on Wikidata on *April 17th*.
This data type refers to the geographical shapes that are enabled on Wikimedia Commons since the beginning of this year. Here you can find more information about this https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps.
The property creators will be able to create properties with this geoshape data type by selecting “Geographical shape” in the data type list.
When the property is created, you can use it in statements, and when filling the value, if you start typing a string, you can choose the name of a geoshape in the list of what exists on Commons.
[image: Screenshot test geoshape in Wikidata.png] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_test_geoshape_in_Wikidata.png
One thing to note: We currently do not export statements that use this datatype to RDF. They can therefore not be queried in the Wikidata Query Service. The reason is that we are still waiting for geoshapes to get stable URIs. This is handled in this ticket https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161527.
Before the deployment, you can test it on http://test.wikidata.org (see for example the property “geotest” on Q22 https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/Q22). If you have any question, feel free to ask!
Cheers,