Hey Thomas :)
On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Thomas Douillard
<thomas.douillard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all, I'm wondering about one usage Wikidata
could be useful to Wikipedias
: Redlinks subject identification.
Wikidata is good to identify subjects. Redlinks are used in Wikipedias to
identify subjects with currently no article.
I post here because I think there is something to integrate this further,
but I don't know exactly what.
A quick review about the current mechanisms we have to link items and/or
articles and subjects together :
* Wikidata interwikis. This works well. Links an item to articles and
articles titles
* articles redirect. This also works well, now we have a mechanism to link
article redirects with items, which is cool.
* There is currently templates like
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6519884
or
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15977575 Interesting mechanisms actually
* Wikidata items aliases : links a set of lexemes to an item
* Special:ItemByTitle and Special:GoToLinkedPage which are great, I don't
know how much they are used in practice though
A little bit different but close
* items redirects
This seems this covers a lot of the user usecases. Yet there is a lot of red
links in Wikipedia with actually no links to a Wikidata item.
My feeling is that what actually lacks in this picture is that the templates
are a bit hackish and that a deeper integration of item numbers with
redlinks would allow to go further and encourage users to make the links at
an earlier stage. What about a Wikisyntax to put an item number into a
Wikilink or a visual editor integration to suggest an entity every time a
user wants to enter a redlink ?
This seems a low hanging fruit for WIkidata development and could make
Wikidata more real to Wikipedia communities. Especially compared to doing
this at the community level where this would require a big maintenance
effort and community knowledge about the templates to make the link beetween
the red label and the corresponding item concrete, especially if visual
editor make the information come to eveyone.
One other solution could be to allow to associate items to yet non existing
articles to "reserve" them, allow redlinks into the Wikidata interwiki list
?
This is indeed an interesting topic and something I want to get done
as well. From the development team's side this isn't something we can
tackle at the moment but I'd definitely like to see this done and am
happy to help with specs and all.
As for simply allowing sitelinks to non-existing articles in Wikidata:
I fear we can't easily do that. If someone adds the link to a specific
item and then another person comes and creates an article under the
same name but for a different topic we have an issue.
Is anyone interested in thinking this through together and writing up
a plan? Once we have that we can figure out if there is someone to
help with implementation.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher -
http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
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