Reminders to update other wikipages when updating the current one
Problem: Often times, when a change is made to one page, other related ones are forgotten about, leading to inconsistencies between pages.
Proposed solution: Don't know. Ideally, there would be a pop-up box that would remind you to edit the other page, giving the relationship and what kind of data needs to be considered for the update. The pop-up should be granular, such that it could apply for either any change on the page, or changes to a specific section. Also, it would be helpful if only users who are logged in were able to set these interdependencies.
Who would benefit: Editors would get reminders, allowing them to update the other pages. Additionally, users of Wikipedia will find information across pages to be more consistent.
As an example, when a sports competition takes place, there are suddenly dozens of athlete pages which need to be updated with medals and I regularly find athlete pages which don't yet have a particular medal added to their infobox. Perhaps there can be a way to make it clear that a particular page is a sports competition and there'd then be a way to find all athlete pages (linked with templates like {{Flagmedalist}} template on en.wiki) that don't yet have a link back to the sports competition page. This can also be discovered elsewhere using scripts or reports but the idea that the editing software provides tools / automated checks for a page, depending on what it is, might be useful so that it can assist with editing related collections of articles. Simeon (talk) 23:28, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Simeon Going by your example, let's say team Foo wins the international cup. So now you want every member of that team to have a medal on their infobox, right? It would seem this, along with what @RSStockdale is describing could be solved with templates. Often times, when a change is made to one page, other related ones are forgotten about, leading to inconsistencies between pages. This is exactly what templates are for. Going back to the sports example, whatever part of the infobox that shows the medal could for example first check a "winners" template, passing in the subject's name. That template will have a big {{#switch:}} statement that returns a non-blank value if the given name is listed, hence you only need to change the info in one place and the other infoboxes update automatically. This is an oversimplified explanation of how you could solve it (I can go into more detail if you'd like), but the point being you should be able to do what you're after now with templates. Unless I'm missing something?
The issue is how MediaWiki is supposed to know which pages need to be updated, when they need to be updated, or if they've already been updated. This would be a very challenging problem to solve, so the more examples you can give, the better; but so far in my mind "templates" seems like the best solution, since you – the editing community – get to decide and write the logic yourself for that specific need. I struggle to envision how the "need" for a notification could be automated without some editorial oversight. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
At the moment, I think both sports competitions and athlete infoboxes can be edited by new and experienced editors alike because it's all just text (so it's {{flagmedalist|[[name of athlete]]|country code}} on the competition page and in an athlete infobox it's something like {{Medal|Gold| [[competition page|<year> <location>]] | name of event }}). If that text-based approach is what the community prefers, then I can imagine the MediaWiki software assisting with that can be useful (so that both new and experienced editors can easily see what medals are missing in infoboxes without setting up externally generated reports etc). For example, there could be a button or UI element that allows one to run a list of (community-defined) checks for the competition page and its related pages (i.e., check for missing medals) and then you'd know that this collection of pages is considered 'consistent' with each other. But, I can also imagine an infobox (sub)template calling Wikidata to request all medals that a particular individual has won and the information is then automatically taken from Wikidata. That would also work, but it'd need to remain easy to edit for both new and experienced editors. So if that approach is implemented in an intuitive way, then I agree there's less of a need to notify editors of what infoboxes are missing medals (as the athlete infoboxes can be made aware of the data that relates to that page). In that case, both the competition page and the infoboxes could pull the medals from Wikidata. I like that approach, but I imagine it to be more work to make it easy to use as opposed to running a query for a collection of related pages (it'd be similar to what PetScan can do, but then when you're on the article page itself). Simeon (talk) 11:51, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Wikidata is an even better idea! I know English Wikipedia has reservations against it, but it would seem possible to add the medal to the athletes item on Wikidata, then the Wikipedia templates know to display it. This is definitely easier, scalable and practical than inventing a new configurable reminder system.
When Community Tech reviews proposals, we look at the problem statement. The problem you describe seems solvable with templates and/or Wikidata. A generic reminder system (which sounds like the Article reminders wish from 2019) is more in-scope, but as we discovered when investigating that wish, time-based Echo notifications is incredibly more complicated and difficult that it would seem (phab:T156808). So unfortunately I'm leaning towards declining this proposal on the basis of existing solutions, and also it re-proposes a wish we declined in the past. However we're happy to let it live in our Larger suggestions category for further discussion. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Another use for this would be redirects, where if the target of one is changed then the target of a similar redirect (e.g. a different capitalisation) should also be changed to match. Thryduulf (talk: meta · en.wp · wikidata) 01:45, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There are a lot of uses of this idea. Because every page has linking to other pages, and they all relates to each other. Maybe, we can use Wikidata in articles? See also Wikidata proposal and we can think about this as updating other pages. When a significant prime is discovered, hundreds of page in other language must be updated, also; and updating is a very harsh task. Thingofme (talk) 10:26, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This one honestly looks too vague/big to action practically. What criteria do you propose to establish that something is sufficiently related to some other to-be-edited content? --Izno (talk) 21:30, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Initially at least, I would leave it up to the wiki-editors to decide if the pages are sufficiently related. If they find that each time they're modifying one page that they then need to modify one or more others, that's when they'd use this new capability. Editors don't live forever, and what one person watches for today can be easily lost in the future, leading to more and more inaccuracies. RSStockdale (talk) 13:23, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose This is why we have Wikidata. We might as well take the time to build the tools to successfully use Wikidata in an article than waste it on creating a band-aid that still requires manually editing multiple articles. Lectrician1 (talk) 22:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, I came here to say this too. In several of my articles, I already use en:template:Wikidata to draw information, so that e.g. updating the number of students at a university automatically updates it in the infobox, the body, the university's people list page, and infoboxes in other languages. I'd encourage folks here to support "Tool to add Wikidata to an article" and "Editing Wikidata from Wikipedia", as that's what's needed to get the system more off the ground. {{u|Sdkb}}talk00:07, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support But like a Wikidata in articles, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, ... We don't have enough contents around it to use more of Wikidata in articles Thingofme (talk) 14:52, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose if you really want this functionality then you can get close with an editnotice or even one of the warnings that triggers when you submit an edit and allows you to go through with it by pressing "Publish changes" a second time. However, volunteers should be able to fix one thing without being bound to fix arbitrarily many other things (which they may not have the time or knowledge to do). On the English Wikipedia, unless it is part of completing one action (like starting an ANI discussion requires notifying the user under discussion) there are very few cases where anybody is compelled to do anything, so I would not support this feature being used on en.wiki, even if the Wishlist team were to produce it. — Bilorv (talk) 10:53, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Good idea Goodlucksil (talk) 19:10, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Oppose This is why we have Wikidata. We might as well take the time to build the tools to successfully use Wikidata in an article than waste it on creating a band-aid that still requires manually editing multiple articles. Lectrician1 (talk) 22:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
22:15, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
It is doubtful too much of an all-in-one problem solving request. --Havang(nl) (talk) 15:55, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
