Topic on Talk:Wikidata Bridge

Some questions about the software

8
Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

I only found out about this today, so I may have missed something. I have tried to use the demo, or at least I think I clicked through to it.

Anyway, I do have some questions and concerns. (These may be relevant to both the minimum viable product and future versions of the software.)

  1. When will the software overwrite existing values – always, sometimes or never? (The reason I ask, for those who are unaware, is that it's actually quite rare for it to be good practice to delete a previously valid value. Often either the new value should be marked as preferred (e.g. things that normally change over time) or the old value should be marked as deprecated (e.g. things that are newly discovered to be incorrect). In some cases none of the values should be preferred or deprecated (e.g. child (P40)), and in some cases multiple values may be preferred (e.g. occupation (P106)).)
  2. Will there be per-property or per-template options on Wikidata to specify what should happen when a value is modified, or will this be left to template creators? Allowing this to be set for each property would presumably save time and prevent stuff from breaking. (I think this might actually be possible with a Wikidata property to be used on other Wikidata properties, but that route wouldn't work for infoboxes that use the plain parser functions, as you would need a helper Lua module to bring the values to the templates.)
  3. Will the software surface the options to change preferred and deprecated ranks?
  4. If there are things that won't be editable through this interface, will the software assist the user in finding help or in modifying the item through the actual Wikidata interface?
  5. How will the software handle properties for which multiple values are used (e.g. occupation) and for which all (or some) of the values should be shown in an infobox?
  6. How will the software handle statements with qualifiers and references? If a value is overwritten, will the qualifiers and references stay? (Obligatory note that qualifiers can significantly change the meaning of a statement, especially for properties for which qualifiers are mandatory.)
  7. How will the software handle properties for which multiple statements with the same value but different qualifiers may be used (e.g. political offices held more than once, both non-consecutively and consecutively)? (I ask mainly because QuickStatements cannot add or modify such statements correctly.)
  8. On Wikidata, statements with an obvious sorting order are usually left out of order because it doesn't matter. If these are presented as sorted by the template (e.g. if Lua is used to sort the values), will the software be able to handle this properly or tell users not to break the existing values?
  9. Some Wikidata templates/modules can take the first value for a property (regardless of whether any values are preferred or deprecated) and discard the others. (I have recently used this configuration in several external link templates.) Will Wikidata Bridge be able to handle this? Will it be able to tell the user about the other values, if there are any?
  10. Will the software tell users how to add local parameters (e.g. fair use images) or allow users to do it through the interface?
  11. How will the software handle wikilinks? Assuming that the user is supposed to enter a page name and not a QID, if a user enters the title of a redirect that is linked to a Wikidata item, how will the software react? Will it ask the user to differentiate between the redirect's item and the target's item?
  12. How will the software handle units? As an example, on the English Wikipedia, both kilometres and miles may be acceptable for the same field, so it could be necessary to allow this to be modifiable (I would note that the demo/prototype actually omits the unit, which could be detrimental).
  13. Which datatypes will the software be able to support upon initial wide release? Is the goal to support every datatype, or just a subset of them?

As an editor of both Wikipedia and Wikidata, I'm cautiously supportive of this, but there are a lot of edge cases that would have to be handled before allowing random users to set this up everywhere, since you could break a lot of items by making it easy to enter bad data that looks correct into an infobox. It would be a shame if this just ends up making it more difficult for Wikidata editors to keep items in order.

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Thanks for your feedback! Here are the answers from the development team.

  1. The interface will guide the editor through edit flows to make sure that the right action is made on Wikidata. Overwriting existing values can happen from time to time, when the existing value is wrong and needs to be fixed.
  2. It's going to be a per template options, that can be set in Lua, because of some very generic properties that are use in various places
  3. Ideally, the tool will edit ranks, but in way that is transparent for the Wikipedia editors? Our goal is to allow Wikipedia editors to edit Wikidata's data without having to fully understand the data model.
  4. Yes, that's a good point, we'll have a link or icon "edit on Wikidata" somewhere
  5. We'll try to show them all in the interface (that will probably not happen in the first version, but later)
  6. We are not sure how it will work, we're still looking into this
  7. Hopefully this will be solved by showing all values (see 5.)
  8. I'm not sure how this would be a problem - can you describe a use case where the order could induce a mistake from the user?
  9. Yes, by showing all values
  10. Not in the first versions, possibly later
  11. In the first version, the tool won't be able to edit values that are links to items - so the question will be solved later
  12. Good point, the editor should be able to see and change the unit
  13. In the first version, we won't support values that are links to other entities (items, properties, etc.) We'll definitely support string and URL datatypes. We'll try to get as much as we can for everything in between.
Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

As an aside to #12, right now each property has to specify its own valid units in its constraints. It would be really nice if these (and similar types of needlessly-duplicated constraints) could be unified across properties which are supposed to use the same units, particularly because a different structure could potentially allow for customizations within Wikidata Bridge like putting important units first and hiding joke units like smoot (Q2095762) and fortnight (Q2993680) or very specific units like Stardate unit (Q50277568).

This sort of work could also potentially be used to improve the actual Wikidata/Wikibase interface – I think a static dropdown would be a welcome improvement over the current find-the-item-yourself search box.

Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

For #8: there's a small chance that the values being shown out of order could nudge a good-faith user to "sort" the values by deleting all of the ones that are out of order, and that could result in errors being introduced (particularly if some parts of the data aren't shown).

Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

For #1: I think it's considered good practice to leave in certain deprecated values (e.g. see d:Q167#P1181), so perhaps it could be left up to other Wikidata editors to remove the deprecated values.

Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

For #2: How will this be "set in Lua"? Will the dialog boxes be enabled by using e.g. HTML attributes to activate JS (which would not require Lua), or will the module have to generate the dialog boxes? Is there a particular Lua function which will be necessary for this?

Jc86035 (talkcontribs)

I also have another question (thank you for your quick response, by the way). Some templates, such as w:en:Template:Authority control, have one pencil icon for all of the data. Will the template have to be changed so that each identifier has to have its own pencil?

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talkcontribs)

Yes, this is probably part of the small changes that the template maintainers will have do to, in order to have a Wikidata Bridge-compliant template.

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