User talk:Jens Ohlig

February 2013

Hello, I'm Drmies. An edit that you recently made to Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) seemed to be a test and it has been removed. If you want more practice editing, the sandbox is the best place to do so. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Jens, neither I nor the editor who reverted you knows why you did this. I suggest that you leave edit summaries explaining it--and doing this with an FA on the front page, without any explanation, is the best way to get it reverted immediately. Thank you. Drmies (talk) 17:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I explained the reasons behind my edit on the talk page of Drmies. --Jens Ohlig (talk)

• Thanks. Drmies (talk) 19:39, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Hello Jens. I have some mild concerns about your language links explanation on Drmies talk-page which leads me to a few questions ...

1. Where on English Wikipedia has such a roll-out been supported by reasonable consensus?
2. What are the implications of this roll-out to editors such as myself?
3. Why do some articles, such as Ely, contain many language links whilst others, such as Little Thetford, contain few?
4. What is the meaning of the obtuse codes such as Q209176 and Q1845104? Are such codes necessary?
5. What should one do, if anything, after encountering an article that reports: Wikidata item not found below the title?
6. Who is responsible for populating the fields, such as Enter a short description in English and Also known as, within forms such as this?
7. What is the "claims/infoboxes" change apparently being planned?

--Senra (talk) 11:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Senra,

1. We've been working and communicating about this project since the start nearly 1 year ago. People are enthusiastic about having it deployed in general. We have already rolled it out on 3 other Wikipedias and things worked well there. We expect the same here.
2. The implications for you as an editor of this first phase are explained in this blog post for example.
3. The difference in number seems to simply be that there are more or less articles about those topics in other Wikipedias.
4. The codes you mention are the IDs we give to things on Wikidata. It's called items there. Since Wikidata is a multi-lingual project we decided to use these instead of going with one language for example. As a user you should not need to care about those though. We're working hard on you not having to worry about them.
5. Do you have an example of an article where you get "Wikidata item not found"?
6. The Wikidata community, which we hope a lot of Wikipedia editors will be a part of (and are already). If you're missing a value that you think should be there please go and enter it.
7. The second phase is about allowing the Wikipedias to use data like the GDP of a country or the length of a river from this central repository named Wikidata. Think of it as similar to Commons but for data instead of multimedia files. Editors will be able to decide which data they will use from Wikidata and where. The first parts of this on the Wikidata-side have been rolled out already. You can see this for example in the upper part of the Wikidata page for Russia. We're now working on allowing additional types of data to be added there as well as making it possible for the Wikipedias to use this data in articles. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:38, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate you taking the time to respond, Lydia. My further queries and an answer follows ...

1. Are you able to link to any English Wikipedia discussions about the Wikidata project and its roll-out plan?
2. Thank you, although I had already read that page
3. Thank you
4. Thank you
5. w:Roy Chaplin displays "Wikidata item not found" under the title after following Jens instructions for adding code to my vector.js
6. Thank you
7. Would I be correct in thinking that most English Wikipedia editors will not be concerned with editing to include Wikidata? I can imagine that there may be an affect on template designers and maintainers who will need to ensure their templates comply within any Wikidata specification. Perhaps most editors will need to continue to add {{persondata}} and there may be a longer term requirement to ensure every article has some kind of {{infox box}} (which is not presently mandatory) but I cannot foresee other effects. Are there any?

--Senra (talk) 17:20, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

There have been various mentions in the SignPost for example of which one of the latest ones is Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-04/Technology report.

About Roy Chaplin: It seems no articles about him exist in other Wikipedias and no-one has yet created a page on Wikidata for him. Feel free to do that.

About infoboxes: Template designers and maintainers can work on moving their templates to Wikidata if they wish so as soon as the necessary data is in Wikidata and the code is written to make it possible. That'll still take a bit. Infoboxes will not be necessary. Infoboxes with Wikidata will not show up automatically unlike the language links. People will have to go and set it up just like they're doing it already now. One of the key differences is that they'll be able to make use of a lot more data that has been collected by more people in more languages. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:28, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me that Wikidata's roll-out plans have been poorly discussed on English Wikipedia. Signpost is a reporting mechanism and clearly does not represent a consensus for deployment. I see from the latest signpost linked to above that there is "an RFC out there". I am trying to locate that RFC. In the meantime, I do understand the power of what you are trying to achieve; I just think Wikidata has not thought through deployment communications properly --Senra (talk) 22:56, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

• I have located one relevant RFC via our help-desk. I note that, at the time of writing, that RFC has had no discussion whatsoever --Senra (talk) 13:54, 19 February 2013 (UTC)