Submissions:2016/New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons

Title

New Frontier: Using Wikidata on Commons

Theme

tech

Academic Peer Review option

n

Type of submission

presentation

Author

Jarek Tuszynski

E-mail address

jaroslaw.w.tuszynski@leidos.com

Username

Jarekt

Affiliation

Abstract

Last May a longstanding feature of "arbitrary access" to Wikidata was activated on Commons allowing any page on Commons to access properties of any Wikidata item. This change finally allowed Commons to start using information from Wikidata and sharing information from Commons with larger community of Wikidata. Currently there are efforts to rewrite numerous infobox templates using Lua, and reconcile and move their content to Wikidata. That includes "Authority Control", "Creator", "Institution", "Artwork" and "Object location" templates. Details of this effort will be described and discussed.

Commons is a multilingual project and we spend a lot of effort on providing information to the final users in their native language. This effort can be greatly improved by Wikidata, where each item can have labels in any language. In the years before Wikidata, a very specific template style was developed that used interwiki links to provide translated label and link to wikipedia article in users language. Those templates are being now replaced with calls to wikidata. Past and future work in this effort will be described and discussed.

Wikimedia Commons is fundamentally different then Wikipedia projects, since it does not use main/article namespace much and most useful information resides in "File", "Category", "Template", "Creator" and "Institution" namespaces. As a result the way Wikidata links to Wikipedias is not ideal fit for Commons project. It is still unclear how "sitelinks" from Wikidata to Commons will be organized and the current state is a mix of several approaches, making Wikidata database unpredictable and hard to use. Several possible approaches and their consequences will be discussed. Differences between how Wikidata links to Wikipedias and Commons also affects tools used to perform much of work on Wikidata, making some of the most powerful tools not very useful.

Length of presentation

30 min +

Special schedule requests

none

Preferred room size

25 or 50

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

y

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1. Avery Jensen (talk) 18:26, 29 August 2016 (EDT)
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