Extension:ArticlePlaceholder



Article Placeholders are automatically generated content pages in Wikipedia or other mediawiki projects displaying data from Wikidata. They are clearly not actual articles but collections of data on topics which do not have an article yet. This project is mostly aimed at smaller Wikipedias with a small contributor base in order to increase access to free and open knowledge by using Wikidata’s resources. One of the objectives is to adjust the Article Placeholders so they suit the overall Wikipedia layout while at the same time making it clear that they are generated articles and not written by a human. The reader should then be encouraged to create or translate an article on the topic. In the long run Article Placeholder may lower the amount of unmaintained articles generated by bots.

Article Placeholder is a mediawiki extension.

Special Page
The extension sets up a special Page (Special:AboutTopic) on a Wikibase client, which uses facts from the connected Wikibase repo page (item) to generate a simple content page (if none already exist) on the client. This page encourages the reader to write an article - in future versions it should use the data the article placeholder is displaying. If the page does exist the user is redirected to the article.

Dependencies
The mediawiki, the extension is running on needs to be a Wikibase client. It needs to be connected with a Wikibase repository or be one itself, too.

Additionally it is necessary to have the following extensions installed:
 * Scribunto for the display of the content
 * Cite for the display of references

Set up
You can clone the extension from gerrit to the extensions folder of your mediawiki installation.

Make sure you have all dependencies set up and running.

Then add to the end of your LocalSettings.php

It's required to set the property for the main image of an item (P18 on Wikidata) in your LocalSettings.php, too. Replace P18 with the appropiate property.

Please keep in mind the extension is work in progress, it may not have all the functionalities expected.

Links

 * Example for Ada Lovelace on WMF Labs
 * Phabricator project
 * Input on the Article Placeholder on Wikidata
 * Pilot project to set up Article Placeholder for species (German)