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.

The documentation of the Lua Module used in ArticlePlaceholder to render the entities from Wikidata can be found at Extension:ArticlePlaceholder/Module:AboutTopic.

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.

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

Dependencies
The ArticlePlaceholder extension requires the Wikibase Client extension, property connected to a Wikibase repository (or be one itself).

Some main functionalities require to have the following extensions installed, but will degrade if not present:
 * Scribunto, for the display of the content;
 * Cite, for the display of references.

Getting the code
You can clone the extension from Gerrit to the  folder of your MediaWiki installation:

$ cd extensions $ git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/extensions/ArticlePlaceholder

Configuration
Add to the end of your LocalSettings.php:

The setting  sets the property used to display the main image of an item (P18 on Wikidata). It needs to be set in LocalSettings.php.

Replace P18 with the appropriate value.

The optional setting  takes a property ID and blacklists the references that use the given property. This is for example used for "imported from", the property indicating that the information was imported from a Wikipedia.

The optional  setting configures whether placeholders will be indexable by search engines. Setting it to  will unconditionally enable indexing, while setting it to   will disable indexing. Setting it to an Item id serialization, like, will make all placeholders for Items that have an id up Q3000 indexable (that includes Q42, but doesn't include Q5000).

Set-up
In order to be able to actually use the functionalities of the special page and the Lua module, it is necessary to import (via Special:Import) the Template and Module AboutTopic. These are located in the extension folder in includes/Template. Read more on how to work with the display on Extension:ArticlePlaceholder/Module:AboutTopic.

Optionally to enable the ordering of properties on the ArticlePlaceholder pages, your Wiki needs a page with a list of sorted properties, an example can be found at Extension:ArticlePlaceholder/MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This page needs to be in the MediaWiki namespace with the the title Wikibase-SortedProperties.

Links

 * Bachelor's thesis on "Generating Article Placeholders from Wikidata for Wikipedia: Increasing Access to Free and Open Knowledge"
 * Examples:
 * nn:Special:AboutTopic/Q845189 - Spotted turtle
 * ht:Special:AboutTopic/Q14384 - Triceratops
 * cy:Special:AboutTopic/Q815102 - Siege of Sydney Street
 * gu:Special:AboutTopic/Q33866 - Theodore Roosevelt
 * Phabricator project
 * Input on the Article Placeholder on Wikidata
 * Pilot project to set up Article Placeholder for species (German)