Topic on Extension talk:ArticlePlaceholder

Hello, the ArticlePlaceholder (AP) seems to me to be a great initiative - if we had it earlier, maybe it would have prevented a lot of "pseudo articles" that have been created over the last years by the hundredthousands in so many smaller Wikipedias.

Recently I checked out the feature in Esperanto Wikipedia. I searched for a person which had no article in Esperanto but, by my knowledge, in Dutch and other languages: "Marietje Schaake". My first search in Esperanto resulted in search results for "Marie de Schalke", with two articles. Only after another search I mentioned, below the page, a link to the AP: "Discover data about the topic". I think that this link could be presented in a more prominent way, in a different wording. "Discover" sounds a little bit like another search, and "data" like something indigestable for human readers. Possible alternatives: "Data sheet about 'item name'", or "We have an overview with information about 'item name'".

In general, but that is a larger problem, the Wikipedia search looks "noisy" and could have a better layout.

First of all: Thank you so much for your feedback!

The Wikipedia search is indeed a bit noisy and doesn't put the Placeholder in a very prominent place. We will consider to add the placeholder results to the right of the regular results as some extensions are now. But we will have to have a look into the usability of that first. The header for this section would become more irrelevant as soon as it's in a more prominent place I assume but I will see in what way we can adjust that, too.

Again, thank you so much!

About the search: I have tried out some topics that exist in more than 3 language versions but not in Esperanto. The Esperanto Wikipedia search engine did not find "Euregio (deutsch-niederländischer Kommunalverband)", maybe because of confusing existing similar article names. It did find "Nederlands Openluchtmuseum" and offered me the link to the AP.

About the AP page itself: The properties and content have too large letter sizes. Especially, I am looking for a link to Wikidata in order to expand or translate about the item. But I can nowhere find such a link, not even in the sidebar.

The problem with items not coming up in the search is, that they need to have a label in Esperanto to be in the search results. Even if they have a label in different languages, that would be the same, they won't appear yet. We will look into that but it probably will have us rethink the way we integrate the results in the Wikipedia search and therefore may need some time.

The sidebar link will certainly be in the next version and we will work more on the size of the text, too. So far I used the standard header of MediaWiki, but I do realize they are too big for our purpose.

By the way, it would do no harm to use the name Wikidata? "We have information about 'item name' from Wikidata". And Wikidata could be mentioned on the AP page: "Information from Wikidata". With a link to the Wikidata page in question. Possibly, even with the mention that the Wikidata page can be edited, if that does not lead to too much vandalism.

Actually, "Placeholder" - why not even offer a link to the Wikidata item page always, even if the Wikipedia language version has an article about the item? Possibly that article is rather short, so that the Wikidata information is quite useful anyway?

I assume that was the idea with the "Wikidata item" link in the left sidebar. But I agree, we should link Wikidata more prominently in the Placeholder page. The first step will be to connect the page to Wikidata as the articles are now with the sidebar link.

A link in the sidebar wouldn't be noticed by most people; so that would be a convencience for the registered and experienced users.