Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-04/Technology report

English Wikipedia to get centralised interwiki links on 11 February


Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality (surfacing interwikis stored on the central [//wikidata.org wikidata.org] repository), is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set. Barring any unforeseen problems, all other Wikipedias will get the client by the end of the month (non-Wikipedia projects not being the focus of phase 1).

Perhaps more importantly, the much more adventurous "data repository" phase of the project remains firmly on course to be completed (and deployed) before the original project completion date of 31 March despite the significant delays to phase 1. With that deployment, users will "be able to create a property 'child'... [and] add a statement to the item for Marie Curie using this property to say that she is the mother of Irène Joliot-Curie and Ève Curie. ... [In addition,] you can support all of these statements by adding references to them." Communities will be left to decide whether and how they wish to use these statements onwiki, but the expectation is that they will be used to turn wikidata.org into what amounts to a central repository for infoboxes.

Some preliminary work from phase 2 went live on Wikidata.org on Monday (example; accompanying blog post). As of time of writing, the eventual fate of the planned third phase (dynamic lists) remains more uncertain.

In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
 * Pick of the blogs: Wikimedia technology bloggers (both WMF and community) had a busy week. Highlights include a commendably thorough discussion of the professionalisation of the WMF Operations Team over the past two years and how it fits in relation to the data centre migration (Wikimedia blog; follow-up about ongoing monitoring and management) and a commentary by board member SJ Klein on the trouble into which ArticleFeedback version 5 has run (personal blog; see also this week's "News and Notes" for full coverage). There was also a useful roundup of the challenges and opportunities posed by the increasing number of visitors accessing Wikipedia through their phones on the Wikimedia blog following the news that the mobile site recorded 3 billion page impressions for the first time last month.