We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data. For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language. Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository. --michael Marcus Buck wrote: > Lars Aronsson hett schreven: > >> What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic >> places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish >> Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other >> languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing? >> >> Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? >> If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just >> copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own >> wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned >> something useful from another one? >> > As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in > another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every > single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about > municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected > new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The > articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively > quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all > articles in all language editions? > > An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time > to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as > new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the > German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. > Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old > mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information. > > It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We > would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch > the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons > and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more > accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of wikis. > > Marcus Buck > > PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük > Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. > With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the > ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to > creating a template that renders the central content into an article. > Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some > templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to > the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like > information, but it would be information. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
