User:Mike Peel/Wikidata infoboxes

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The infobox in the South Pole Telescope article, which is entirely Wikidata-driven

Wikidata infoboxes use information from Wikidata to populate each row. Wikidata provides centralised data that is accessible from all language Wikipedias, as opposed to information that is defined in the article. An example of this in action is at South Pole Telescope, which uses {{Infobox telescope}}. There are currently over 1,000 infoboxes that use Wikidata for everything, and many more that partially use Wikidata.

How do they work?[edit]

They work in the same way as normal infoboxes, using the {{Infobox}} template. However, in addition to using the normal parameters, they also have Module:Wikidata or Module:WikidataIB calls (see the module documentation for details). Local definitions of parameters override Wikidata entries; if no local parameter is defined then Wikidata is used.

It's sort of like images and Wikimedia Commons. If you have a local copy of an image, then that is displayed in preference to the one on Wikimedia Commons. If there isn't a local copy, then the one on Commons is shown.

Why are they useful?[edit]

We currently keep copies of facts across many different language Wikipedias, and we even repeat them several times in the same article. Those copies can get out of sync: we can end up giving several different values for the same fact, either due to vandalism or accident. Wikidata lets us define it once and then call that information across all languages, and across different articles, uniformly.

Infoboxes show the core facts about the subject of any given article, so they are the obvious place to start with using Wikidata to unify factual information across the Wikimedia projects.

We also gain from coordinating efforts on these core facts across the Wikimedia projects: we can add information to Wikidata now, in whichever language you use, that will show up on multiple Wikipedia language projects. There are many articles that have incomplete infoboxes, which this can immediately help with.

A potential downside is that we make it easy to vandalise many Wikipedia articles at once by vandalising a Wikidata value; however, it is also easier to spot the vandalism in this case so it should be reverted more quickly.

How do I edit their contents?[edit]

  • If content hasn't been migrated to Wikidata, then you'll be able to edit it locally in the article.
  • If you can, please add the information to Wikidata, and remove the local value
  • If it has been migrated to Wikidata, then access the Wikidata entry for the article to edit it.
  • If you want to redefine it locally, then just add the relevant parameter to the infobox into the article. You'll probably need to look at the infobox documentation to find the relevant parameter.

How do I find the Wikidata entry to edit?[edit]

In addition to the "Wikidata item" link in the left-hand sidebar of Wikipedia, there are either "[edit on Wikidata]" links at the bottom-right of the infobox or pencil links next to each value, which point towards the relevant Wikidata entry.

Ideally, it would be possible to edit the Wikidata information directly on Wikipedia using the visual editor, but that's something for the future.

How do I watch for changes?[edit]

Your Special:Watchlist should already be showing you the changes that are made to Wikidata entries for articles you're watching. If it isn't, then go to Special:Preferences, and in the 'Watchlist' tab make sure that 'Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist' is selected. You can also use a Wikidata watchlist to do the same.

What about references?[edit]

Most infoboxes on Wikipedia are currently unreferenced - they rely on the content being repeated in the body of the article and referenced there, and that isn't always the case. That creates a problem for migrating them to Wikidata: it's not as simple as copying over the fact and the reference, you need to do some digging to find out the references.

Quite often you'll see that a fact has been imported from Wikimedia project (P143) a Wikipedia, which is a start but isn't particularly useful on its own. Wikidata supports at least reference URL (P854), retrieved (P813) dates, stated in (P248) and publication date (P577) - so some parts of references can be added to the values in the Wikidata entries. However, more properties are probably needed to fully record references. We also need to figure out how to include reference information in infoboxes (should we automatically import them as inline citations?).

At the moment, some Wikidata infoboxes do import references from Wikidata via Module:Wd. These use {{cite web}} and {{Cite Q}}. This works reasonably well, but needs improvement.

We can only fetch information from Wikidata that is referenced there using the "onlysourced" parameter.

How does the licensing work?[edit]

Wikidata is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-0 license. Wikipedia articles are licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.

As such, Wikidata facts can be included in Wikipedia articles without needing attribution links. Facts from Wikipedia (and any other source) can be added to Wikidata as facts aren't copyrightable in their own right.

Key problems[edit]

See also[edit]

Category:Wikidata

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