User:Adam Harangozó/template

Connecting Wikipedia articles to reliable sources through new template

Background

There are many great online, freely accessible reference works, encyclopedias, biographies, virtual exhibitions which are unknown for most people or maybe even completely forgotten after a few years (academia has a problem with communication?). This also means they are not channeled in to Wikipedia (some general examples are Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology absent from the Anthropology article, The First Amendment Encyclopedia missing from the First Amendment article, Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development missing from related articles). Even if used, they easily get lost among references or a longer list of external links.

At the same time, more and more of these sites are connected to Wikidata, the ID each article in the source added to the corresponding Wikidata item.

You can check the ones that already have their own Wikidata property ([1]), the ones that are being matched to Wikidata items but don’t have their property yet ([2]), and a growing list of sites to be included in Wikidata ([3]).

Idea

To make these sites visible in Wikipedia, I would like to propose a new template. The main purpose of this template is to collect and show links which lead to articles/chapters in reliable sources that have additional textual information (not only data or images) on the subject, like encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, GLAM sites, academic projects, etc. Similar to Template:Authority control or Template:Taxonbar but with content that expands on the topic and provides further reading.

Goals, advantages

• promote the use, presence and knowledge of reliable sources
• encourage further reading
• add depth to article stubs, help finding sources for expanding them
• make Wikidata more visible
• possibly facilitate authors of the external sites to recognise/contribute to Wikipedia
• help smaller language Wikipedias to gather content/make their wikis more visible

There are similar templates on other Wikis, these are the ones I know of:

• w:fr:Modèle:Dictionnaires
• w:es:Plantilla:Control_de_autoridades
• w:it:Template:Collegamenti_esterni

An important feature of the template would be its multilinguality. This means two things. First, that it is meant to be used in any language Wikipedias, using the same central list of sources and automatically ordering the IDs to show the local language ones first. Second, in the case of multi-language sites, it could handle multiple formatters and use the one in the local language, perhaps also offer the other languages in a bracket.

I think by having the template prefer open-access sources would not only prioritise for the readers articles they can actually read but would promote open access in general. On the other hand, as this would exclude paywalled sites like Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, probably best if they are still included but in a separate category or just shown with a lock icon next to them.

Visuals

Visually it would be similar to authority control but rather as a sidebar, located on the side of the external links section or below the main infobox of the article. Another option is to still have it as a navbox, and include it in the beginning of the external links section like Template:Medical_resources (for example in Influenza). It should be distinct from the authority control navbox so it wouldn’t go unnoticed to the reader. Still, it shouldn’t take too much space so it wouldn’t get too distracting. It could also help in taking some weight off authority control as sites in this template should not have to be included there, making it clear what purpose each one serves. It would be important that the template shows the full name of the sites instead of abbreviations (so Historische Lexikon der Schweiz instead of HLS) even if this takes more space because readers are not necessarily familiar with the short names and they would know what they are clicking on (w:fr:Modèle:Dictionnaires is this way). Also, abbreviations don’t always work with multilingual sites as they have the title translated with a different short name. Plus, search engines would show the article with the template if someone looks up encyclopedias. If the list would be too long, taking up too much space, it could be that only the local language part is expanded and the others are in a collapsed section.

Technical background

The template would use external IDs from Wikidata. By this, it would be easily expandable and translatable to other languages. Wikidata and the template would be expanding together automatically as a new ID added to an item would also show up in the template. If the URL of the ID changes (and is updated in Wikidata) the ID would automatically be changed in the template too.

In order not to get entangled with some inconsistency/lack in the tagging and titling of these sources in Wikidata, the sites referenced by the template would not be automatically generated from Wikidata but rather come from a centralised list which would be maintained and expanded by the community on consensus about what is a good enough source to be included.

From Wikidata, the template would gather the following: the ID (from property statements in the items), the formatter URL (from property), the language(s) and the title(s) of the site (from the qualifiers of the formatter URL and _not_ from statements in the property’s subject item as those are often non-existent or lack information).

To further minimise the risk of having IDs that lead to the wrong article or are just offline, the template could have a simple report button which would automatically generate a note to check the IDs for the specific item.

Examples

Obviously these are handcrafted, including some sites that don't have a Wikidata property yet and not using multi-language formatters but it shows the potential of the template.

Tasks, things needed

In Wikipedia:

• Editors who comment on the idea, help to make it better, thinking about how to make it easily translatable and available for all wikis.
• Template editors who would like to do the coding. The best would be to contact and work together with the creators of the three similar templates, build on those of possible - I’d be happy to help in coordinating this.
• Creating bots that could help spreading the template in articles.
• Writing documentation for the template with info on how to use the template in articles, what are the rules for expanding the list of sources.

In Wikidata:

• Tagging the external ID properties’ formatter URLs with qualifiers for title and language, adding missing formatters for multi-language sites.
  • This is an important concern!
  • Website URLs are required to have qualifier "language of work" but formatterUrls currently are not, and I don't know of any examples.
  • We may need to use the WD Toolforge resolver that can reformat target URLs based on some rules; and can perhaps take a context param (Wikipedia language) to put it in the target URL --Vladimir
• Submitting property proposals for sources that don’t have it.
• Matching items in Mix'n'match.
• Expanding the meta list.

As I lack coding skills, these are just what I came up with and there are probably a lot more to consider.

Possible issues

• link to encyclopedia already in article's external links
• making sure the template's list only includes quality sites
  • Can be done with extra qualifiers on the formatterUrl --Vladimir
• how can the database of sites be maintained centrally if it is used by many language wikis (how do they communicate?)
  • I think this is best done on WP? --Vladimir
• multiple ID values under a property in an item
  • Shouldn't be a big problem, can list two links after filtering values with non-Best rank (Deprecated or not Preferred) --Vladimir

Help Needed

I would like to ask your opinion about an idea for Wikipedia template and ask if you are interested in developing it. It would be a Wikidata-based template which would collect external IDs from Wikidata pointing to other reference works and show them on the item's Wikipedia article - similarly to authority control but with sites that contain additional, reliable textual information (encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, etc.). Similar templates are being used in the French, Italian, and Spanish wikis. What do you think about the idea? Would you be interested in working together on this project and would you like to write the code for the template? It might be enough to change the code of the already existing templates a bit but I'm not sure. Let me know and feel free to share any ideas, suggestions.

♦ Some comments moved to the TP

See also

• General project discussions
• Technical discussions and specifications on the project
• French translation of this page (Traduction française de cette page)