Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Watchlists/Improve Wikipedia Watchlist Handling of Wikidata

Improve Wikipedia Watchlist Handling of Wikidata

  • Problem: We use elements from Wikidata within Wikipedia. If those elements are changed we need the ability to only see those changes. Currently if you want to look at Wikidata edits within your Wikipedia watchlists it contains elements not used within the article in question (such as changes to aliases in all languages). For example below in my watchlist you see changes to content that is not used within English Wikipedia and 90% of the Wikidata edits in my English watchlist pertain to other languages.

     
    Watchlist Wikidata integration issue
  • Who would benefit: The quality assurance processes at Wikidata and an increased possibility of using Wikidata within Wikipedia.
  • Proposed solution: Only show those items / properties actually used within the Wikipedia article. Nothing more.
  • More comments: User:Ladsgroup accomplished much of this work. Only a few more steps needed to finish.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion

Making wikidata in the watchlist work nicely as above and then setting "Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist" to default enable would greatly help monitoring of wikidata changes and vandalism detection. Galobtter (talk) 08:08, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Tagging on to this, I think the Wikidata watchlist notifications are generally hard to decipher, as they rely too much on the P numbers and not the property names. --NessieVL (talk) 16:46, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this last point. Lines like "Mildred Dresselhaus (Q29573) (diff | hist) . . GerardM (discuter | contributions) (Affirmation ajoutée : Property:P166: Q57647862, #quickstatements ; Qualificatif ajouté : Property:P585: 1998, #quickstatements)" are really hard to decipher. Instead of P166 and P585, the property name in the language of the user should be displayed . The same for Q57647862. Pamputt (talk) 12:44, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've put up Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Wikidata/Expand automatic edit summaries to deal with the decipherability issue. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:15, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Out of curiosity about the ideas behind this proposal and/or the work that has already been done, and to add some additional remarks/questions (and because the appropriate "mention" notifications were unchecked in my preferences earlier), I'll repeat my remark here:

  • I support the splitting the Watchlist's "Wikidata edits" filter into three types of edits: the ones that change the information in the articles themselves (as described here), the ones that change project links (language/interwiki projects, sister projects), and the rest of the edits. @Doc James and Ladsgroup: is something like this what you have in mind?

Additional remarks/questions: this proposal is in the Watchlists category of the survey, and only watchlists are mentioned in the proposal text (and the discussion and vote comments), but isn't this actually about the revision history of the articles? With, technically, a second "revision history" for the pages in the local projects, which only tracks the changes to items/properties actually used within the local article at that time (on the front/user's end probably merged into one revision history somehow), those changes wouldn't just be temporarily visible to the active users who watch their watchlists or some "related changes" list, but to anyone viewing a page's revision history, any time. From there, showing these changes on watchlists and such will be a small step. I actually hope that is the road you are planning to take, because such a thorough implementation of the ability to track these changes locally would be a huge improvement in quality assurance and thus Wikidata usage within the local projects!

The second type of Wikidata edits I mentioned (changes to project links) is in my opinion a less important one, not really necessary to store locally – also by their nature (interwiki connections) it makes perfect sense to store those changes only on the Wikidata project. But for the watchlists on the local projects, it would still be great to have them separated from the 90% of the Wikidata edits that doesn't affect the article in question.

With kind regards — Mar(c). [O] 20:48, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:Mar(c) yes that would do nicely. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:00, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting