Filling red links with Wikidata

Filling red links with Wikidata is a proposed solution for the Wikipedias which don't have the luxury of millions local articles. Instead of making bots create millions of entries with infoboxes and standard sentences filled by some data source, as was done for many years (since 2002) for municipalities, asteroids, forms of life etc., we could transparently show similar placeholder articles with data provided by Wikidata. A topic, when covered on Wikidata, would automatically be summarised on virtually all Wikipedias.

The idea was floating on wikimedia-l in 2013 and has been explicitly proposed in January 2014.

Pro:

• No need to actually create local pages with controversial bots.
• Most red links would actually provide some information. We'd have 4+ millions articles on each language edition, not just one.
• Some wikis already bot-create articles which only contain a placeholder template. They would be more useful with Wikidata information, at least in the way of w:la:Formula:Capsa Vicidata.

  

  Capsa Vicidata

Occitan Wikipedia: script-error at bot-generated wikidata article

Con:

• Less incentive to actually make the red link blue (create the article)?
• Should the link still be red?
• Not obvious how to make the placeholder editable, though not impossible.
• Research:Wikidata gap analysis
• You don't really think you can make grammatical sentences out of bare data in 280 languages for 4 millions topics, do you?

See also

• Abstract on a topic with sentences filled by Wikidata, in Magnus Manske's Reasonator
• The ArticlePlaceholder extension displays an article page with information from Wikidata and is in use on several wikipedias, but as of February 2020 it is not triggered on missing pages.
  • 2015 discussion: d:Wikidata:Article placeholder input
• Reasonator use in Wikipedias (explicit proposal)
• Mike Linksvayer on "Shaver: Copyright and Inequality"
• Wikidata/Notes/Article generation and phabricator:tag/MediaWiki-extensions-ArticlePlaceholder
• en:Template:Redwd, which puts a Wikidata link next to red links for subjects which have no Wikipedia article in any language
• Actual creation/translation of articles
  • Machine translation
  • mw:Content translation
  • A proposal towards a multilingual Wikipedia
• Alternative content ingestion/recommendation ideas
  • Machine learning on references