Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects/Projects/Watchlist Wikidata Sitelinks Tracking

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T295356

Inconsistent tracking of Wikidata sitelinks causing noise in Watchlists

The Problem

Lua has two functions for retrieving sitelinks from a Wikidata item:

entity:getSitelink()
mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid)

1. Tracks changes by adding the Sitelink aspect (any changes to the sitelink of the Wikidata item will trigger a notification). This method is used when we already have access to the Wikidata entity (as getting the Wikidata entity tends to be expensive in terms of data transferral).

2. Retrieves sitelink via its QID and tracks changes by setting the :Title aspect (changes to the title associated with the sitelink trigger a notification). This method can be used more broadly across the MediaWiki codebase as it is usually more efficient.

Both methods are retrieving the same information but they are also triggering different tracking mechanisms.

This is resulting in 'junk' Watchlist notifications of duplicate or irrelevant changes that cause alert fatigue to editors who may turn off or ignore watchlist notifications from the affected article(s).

This can cause editors to miss important changes (such as vandalism) to their articles of interest.

The Solution

We will unify tracking of sitelink retrieval by giving both functions the same check when there are no additional arguments, this should result in both methods returning the same result; either the :Title or :Sitelink aspect.

This will help ensure notifications are only sent for relevant changes that genuinely impact watched articles.

Status

Development

Development on this task started at the end of August, 2024.

Deployment

As of September 3, 2024, the patch was added to MediaWiki version MW-1.43.0-wmf.21 and has been deployed to all live Wiki groups by September 5, 2024.