Community Tech/Deprecation of RelatedSites extension

RelatedSites extension is being deprecated from Wikimedia sites. The extension has been superseded by Wikidata-generated "In other projects" links in the sidebar. This task is being undertaken by the Community Tech team in the Foundation as a result of the Stewardship process (task T185206).

This page documents a project the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Tech team has worked on or declined in the past. Technical work on this project is complete.

We invite you to join the discussion on the talk page.

Status

Nov 7, 2018

RelatedSites has been removed from all Wikimedia wikis. Thanks to everyone who helped with this effort by removing RelatedSites links from their projects and helping migrate links to Wikidata.

Oct 5, 2018

The RelatedSites deprecation script has been run on all wikivoyages containing RelatedSites links in the main namespace. See task T202761 for updates.

July 5, 2018

We are currently in the process of gathering data and initiating conversations on wikivoyages which have a massive amount of RelatedSites links to seek consensus on removal of the extension. The top 5 in the list are plwikivoyage (~5000 links), nlwikivoyage (~3400 links), ptwikivoyage (~3300 links), eswikivoyage (~1600 links) and elwikivoyage (~600 links).

Reasons for deprecation

• The use of Wikidata items for generating related site links provides a more robust and centralized solution for linking to other sites.
• The links can be updated in one place in case of the link being changed or redirected.
• RelatedSites extension is no longer maintained and hence when bugs come up, it is a maintenance burden.

Removing RelatedSites links

RelatedSites extension links look like: `[[wikipedia:...]]` or `[[commons:...]]` in the wikitext markup. Typically placed at the bottom of the article. To remove the RelatedSites links, simply remove that link from the wikitext.

To find out which pages are using RelatedSites links, we have generated a category to keep track of those pages: Category:Pages using RelatedSites. The same category should exist on every wikivoyage wiki.

Note: Once RelatedSites extension is removed from Wikimedia sites, the links will no longer show up in the sidebar and instead appear as plain text in the article content space.

Generating "In other project" links

"In other project" links are generated from Wikidata automatically. To add a new link for a page, go to the page's Wikidata item (if it has one) by clicking on the Wikidata item (or equivalent link in other languages) link under Tools (or equivalent in other languages) in the sidebar. In the Wikidata item, add the new page you want to link with in the appropriate project and language. Once the link is added, it will automatically show up in the sidebar for the right language.

For example, let's look at How to redirect a page article on English Wikivoyage. There are several "In other project" links in the sidebar:

On the Wikidata item for the page, we see links for other projects:

To add a new page, simply edit the links to add the new project link.

Note: These links cannot be generated for User pages which typically do not have Wikidata items. A better way to have those links is by creating userboxes on the user page.

Questions?

Please talk to us on the talk page and we'd be happy to help you migrate your links to Wikidata or help with any other concerns you might have. You may also voice your opinions on task T185206 which the developers are involved in.