As part of my Bachelor’s thesis I worked on an extension called
“ArticlePlaceholder”
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ArticlePlaceholder over the last
months.
One of the biggest barriers for accessing the knowledge Wikipedia provides
is language.
There are many topics that are only covered in few, big Wikipedias. People
who don’t speak any of these languages don’t have access to all the
information available potentially vital to them.
The Article Placeholder extensions aims at smaller Wikipedias to support
them in increasing access to data available on Wikidata. Article
Placeholders are automatically generated content pages in Wikipedia or
other mediawiki projects displaying data from Wikidata. They are clearly
not actual articles but an overview of data on a topic which does not have
an article yet. The design of the page and its content is under the control
of the local community via Lua and templates but we will provide defaults
so smaller Wikipedias can work with them without having to worry about the
technical side of it.
I have a test setup on Labs with an example for Ada Lovelace
http://articleplaceholder.wmflabs.org/mediawiki/index.php/Special:AboutTopi…
The reader can find these pages by searching for a topic and gets results
if there is an Item on Wikidata with the respective label and/or alias.
The reader would benefit a lot since even if there is no article on a topic
yet, they will still have basic information provided in their language. But
it also might increase the numbers of editors due to increased usefulness
of that Wikipedia.
We are now looking for the first Wikipedias to support the extension by
deploying it and giving their input. I am still developing the extension
and the first Wikipedias to try it will naturally have a larger say in how
it evolves.
If your Wikipedia would like to give it a try please let me know. We would
start it as a beta feature.
Thank you,
Lucie (Frimelle)
--
Lucie-Aimée Kaffee
Working Student Software Development
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0http://wikimedia.de
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