Wikipedia:Wikidata interwiki RFC



Background: First steps of Wikidata in the Hungarian Wikipedia and Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-01-14/Technology_report

Note: This RFC will be scheduled to close at 00:01 February 1, to allow enough time for preparations before the launch of Wikibase on the English Wikipedia. Currently Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias are scheduled for January 30; a date for the English Wikipedia has not been set yet.

Proposal
The English Wikipedia has a long-standing precedent against gnomish edits that provide no visible change (examples: edits that change only whitespace, Image: to File: namespace conversions, HTML entities, etc.) Since the Wikibase extension will recognize both the interwiki links in the Wikidata item and the interwiki links remaining in our articles, edits to remove these links would qualify under the same category. Therefore, edits that solely remove the interwiki links should not be performed, as this would result in over 4 million edits being added to the database for no good reason. Such edits should be combined with other changes to the article.

Considerable leeway will be given to Wikidata developers (who need to remove links to test to make sure the Wikibase extension is functional once installed), local users testing the feature out on launch day, and for global editors whose home is not the English Wikipedia and are not aware of this guideline (for the Hungarian Wikipedia launch, editors came to hu.wikipedia.org from many other WMF sites and started removing hundreds of interwiki links).

Additional implementation notes
At this time, Wikidata does not have a way to mark FAs and GAs in other projects, and thus link FA and link GA should not be removed from articles.

Interwiki bots should not restore interwiki links to articles once they have been removed. Attempts to contact bot operators will be made prior to the launch of the Wikibase extension on the English Wikipedia. The edit filter and/or blocks may be used to stop interwiki bots that are not properly updated, after sufficient efforts and time have been made to resolve the situation otherwise.