Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2018 State of affairs/Archive 1

RfC at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style
An RfC has been initiated at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Please comment there, not here. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:53, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

References invisible on protected Wikidata items when not logged in?
Is it just me, or is this is a common problem ("feature" probably)? When I go to Homer on Wikidata, I can see the references. When I log out (visit as an IP or a normal reader), the "X references" beneath each item becomes grey, and I can't open them; this means that all non-logged in editors can't actually see any references... I don't think it is useful to send readers to items where they can't even see the references. Fram (talk) 13:33, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
 * That's weird. I can reproduce it, but only on some entries. I think it's related to when the Wikidata pages are protected. Pinging and I'll raise it on phabricator - now at T186006. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:26, 30 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for filing the ticket, Mike Peel. That is indeed weird. We'll look at it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:59, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Gross obscenities on St Valentine's Day mobile version in Portuguese
This is not related to the RfC going on, but to the mobile version displaying Wikidata contents from description field. As we are approaching St. Valentine's Day, a fellow sysop from the Portuguese Wikipedia noticed there were gross obscenities displaying in the mobile version of our article, and not immediately finding the source of the vandalism, asked my help to remove it (which I did, of course). The obscenities were there, at such an high-profile article, apparently unnoticed, since July 2017. This is absolutely not acceptable, the irresponsibility of using those Wikidata descriptions on our Wikipedia articles is damaging even more the reputation of our project. we already have our problems, which are not few, and we don't need one more to pill up. Can this thing be reverted? Where can we appeal to remove that "functionality" from our project? Thanks, -- Darwin  Ahoy!  23:18, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Improved watchlist and recent changes integration
Hey everyone,

One of the things my team has been working on over the past months is improving the integration of Wikidata changes in the watchlist and recent changes on Wikipedia. Specifically (based on what you've all been saying loud and clear) we reduced the number of changes showing up. We have significantly reduced the number of changes showing up by not showing the ones that do not have an effect on your articles here (e.g. the addition of a label in a language other than English). This means here we are reducing the number of changes from Wikidata from around 40000 to around 15000 per day right now. (This fluctuates but this is a good current approximation.) On some other Wikipedias as much as 95% of changes have been removed that were previously included. This was no easy feat and I was not sure if we'd ever be able to scale it enough to make it work on English Wikipedia. I'm happy it worked out now. I hope this will make Wikidata integration in the watchlist and recent changes significantly more useful for you. That being said it is still far from perfect and I'd love to hear from you where you think we should continue improving it. (Concrete examples and links = <3) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:23, 18 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks. From what still appears in recent changes, I note some at first sight unnecessary things like


 * (diff | hist) . . D Mandarin Chinese (Q9192); 11:16 . . Infovarius (talk | contribs) (‎Added [ru] alias: севернокитайский язык)
 * (diff | hist) . . D Metropolitan Natural Park (Q15253271); 11:13 . . &beer&love (talk | contribs) (‎Created claim: Property:P31: Q728904, #petscan)

which both have no effect on enwiki (property P31 is "instance of", the use of P and Q numbers instead of values still isn't solved sadly). The reverse, whether things we need to see are actually still shown, is harder to tell (all I get are interwiki links added or changed, no content changes, but this is not unlikely from a single snapshot).

The delay between Wikidata and here also means that the standard "recent changes" doesn't show any Wikidata changes, you need to expand it from 100 to 500 (article namespace only) to get some results (usually; if you are unlucky the delay is even bigger and no WD changes appear in the 500 recent changes at all). This seriously reduces the effect of this for recent changes patrolling. Fram (talk) 11:32, 27 March 2018 (UTC)


 * They should both indeed not show up. I'll look into it. Thanks. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:46, 31 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Irrelevant Wikidata changes also still appear in my Watchlist, such as:

m D 14:43 	Diesel locomotive‎ (Q34336) (diff | hist). . GuySh (talk | contribs) (Language link added: he:קטר דיזל)
 * --Ita140188 (talk) 06:37, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Since adding a language link in the sidebar influences your article we consider this relevant. But if there is broader agreement that that's not something people care about we could look into changing it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:47, 12 April 2018 (UTC)


 * The language links are relevant. I have re-enabled WD entries in my watchlist and since spotted one incorrect language link, where an editor had added a link which was better added to another page, as well as some vandalism. Unlike before it’s now genuinely useful, as the massive amounts of irrelevant noise seem to have been eliminated.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 13:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)


 * I don't see how the addition of that link is helpful in my watchlist. I don't understand Hebrew, I don't even know how to pronounce it. Also, I am not really interested at what happens in other language Wikis for the same reason. I think displaying language links should be an opt-in feature. We already can hide bot edits and other things in the watchlist, why not this too. --Ita140188 (talk) 03:01, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's optional. You need to enable the 'Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist' option of your watchlist settings.-- JohnBlackburne wordsdeeds 03:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * of course I mean to make optional the inclusion of language links edits only, not all Wikidata edits. I would like to know if someone changes a property value in a Wikidata entry, but I'm not interested if the page is linked to the wrong article in another Wiki. --Ita140188 (talk) 04:28, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I would also rather have this feature. For most languages and many items I can detect whether it is vandalism or not, and other languages / items I can just skip, I have several thousands items on my en.wp watchlist anyway.--Ymblanter (talk) 04:21, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Today, I noticed In my watchlist. This is, as far as I can recall, the very first time I see something else than interwikis on my watchlist. I did test last week, where I took changes on WikiData, and watchlisted the accompanying page on en.wikipedia, to no avail...
 * m D 01:47 	Wikipedia talk:Wikidata/2018 State of affairs‎ (Q7251) (diff | hist) . . Njohnson7 (talk | contribs) (‎Changed [en] label: Alan Turing; ‎Updated [en] aliases: Alan Turing, Alan M. Turing, Alan Mathieson Turing, Turing)

This specific situation is however worrysome ... I know that there are properties being used in templates so they transclude onto thousands of pages. If I have a significant number of those pages on my watchlist, am I then flooded if someone would change that on datapoint on en.wikipedia (note, I checked by adding Alan Turing to my watchlist - it showed up). —Dirk Beetstra T C 05:39, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Tool needed to see what WMF is getting from the magic word
, we need a way to see what is returned from a call to from outside, so we can effectively integrate the magic word and debug our templates. has done a few tests, but I don't know if his method is simple enough for the average editor. What can be done to provide the necessary tools? (being able to make the call from inside Wikipedia code would also be OK, possibly better, we just need to be able to do it from somewhere accessible}&middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:48, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Any highschooler with a course in Javascript can do this. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:59, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Wonderful. Then WMF should be able to produce something pretty quickly, so we can check that the system they imposed on us works the way it should when we apply it in the ways that make sense to us. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:15, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Sure. All they need is to find a highschooler with a course in Javascript – and a course in the wikipedia api and the construction of gadgets and AJAX and preferably jQuery and user-agent policy and CORS (if they want to do any off-wiki testing). Should be simple, but I'm not holding my breath waiting. --RexxS (talk) 02:37, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Oh, That kind of simple. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 05:38, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Once the new code is merged and deployed (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/423245/), you'll be able to see the results via the page info (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=London&action=info). No JavaScript or API needed. Kaldari (talk) 21:28, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yer, we know that, but we were kinda thinking about how we can easily see in the meantime. Sell me a story about how quickly the new code will be merged and deployed, but don't tell me we don't need JavaScript or API to observe the magic word's functioning while we wait. --RexxS (talk) 22:56, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I might have missed a chapter in the story but while it would be great to have the short description in the information page, the whole point of using SHORTDESC at enwiki was that it would be possible for editors to easily view and control descriptions so vandalism could be rectified. I guess that means an opt-in method of showing, for example, a highlighted bar of text at the top of the article so those who care can see what is going on. Johnuniq (talk) 23:20, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * One of the ways of doing that, is deploy the magic word wrapped inside a template, as we're doing in these early stages. That allows us to use CSS to display the short description in the article for those who care to enable it (and add tracking categories, etc.) Although we can see what the magic word has been set to now, we still don't yet see that short description actually in use in the Wikipedia app and in search suggestions, etc. Without being sure that what we give to  is actually turning up where we want it to, it's hard to be sure we have properly debugged what we've done so far. I imagine that even in the long term, we will want to have the value of SHORTDESC: displayable on the article page so that vandal fighters can easily spot when somebody's changed the SHORTDESC: for Donald Trump to "clown". --RexxS (talk) 23:53, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That I don't know. If short descriptions are turned off for a wiki (as they are for English Wikipedia), it doesn't seem to pass the description to the client, i.e. you can't use . It seems like there needs to be an intermediate state where the description is passed to the client, but not yet shown to everyone in the UI. I'm not actually working on this, so you may want to follow up on the Phabricator task  and ask about it there. Kaldari (talk) 23:38, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That's interesting. The description does seem to be passed somewhere to the database from en-wiki and can be retrieved by an api call like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=description&titles=Alan_Turing (which returns "description": "mathematician and computer scientist", "descriptionsource": "local" - as opposed to the description "British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist" from on Wikidata). I'm already subscribed to  and I'm happy to monitor there for progress. Although I should note that I voiced my concern with the issue currently being solved in August 2016, so I'm getting used to waiting.  --RexxS (talk) 00:07, 3 April 2018 (UTC)

Sigh. MediaWiki:Gadget-Page_descriptions.js. Enable it from your prefs (in the testing section). Red is missing, orange means it's from wikidata (you can click it to go there). Editor hints only available for those who are auto confirmed. Only works for Vector and Monobook. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:07, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * , I tried, but it does not appear to work for me. Vector, Firefox and Windows 10. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 09:36, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The gadget appears to be incompatible with the Appearance gadget to Display an assessment of an article's quality in its page header. They both try to occupy the same place in the display. The quality assessment gadget wins most of the time. Other than this issue it seems to do the job pretty well. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 06:24, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * based on this script for showing wikidata descriptions which works with quality assessment gadget, I slightly tweaked the gadget at User:Galobtter/Page description testing.js which works with the article quality gadget. Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:58, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Also removed a spurious? comma at the end of the description Galobtter (pingó mió) 07:05, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I think the comma was there because it was supposed to be followed by the text "from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
 * I have installed Galobtters fix in my common.js and it works, but the display is not in the ideal position as in TheDJ's script. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:17, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'll see if I can better position the text. The script, is now at User:Galobtter/Page_description.js, and has an "import" button, which copies the wikidata description in and put short description at the top Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:38, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * . It now appears to work exactly the same as TheDJ's original. Conflicts with assessment gadget. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 12:31, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * InteWell, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I tagged an article as NSFW with, among other things, the comment that I wasn't sure whether it was about a person or a web site, and that it had no references. The author added a lede sentence, but no references, and didn't try to clean up the malformed infobox. I declined it again with a warning that resubmitting it again without references will result in deletion being requested. I didn't think it was a G11 candidate, just crud. The NSFW template does, reasonably, say to ask for advice at the Teahouse. Robert McClenon (talk) 9:58 pm, Today (UTC+5.5)

resting, to me it works about every time. (maybe all the other js I have there slows down the loading of my script so it runs after metadata gadget..). Any nice solution that keeps it at the top would involve editing MediaWiki:Gadget-metadata.js rather I guess Galobtter (pingó mió) 12:42, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * What controls the order in which user scripts and gadgets are executed? &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 08:19, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Chaos theory (as in, it's asynchronous and therefore non-deterministic order). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:51, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, somewhat unpredictable then. So sometimes there would be something to which the description can be prepended, other times not, so it is overwritten when that thing turns up later. Could a line be added to the assessment gadget to append its output to the description when it exists to deal with the cases where the order of execution is unfavourable for the current setup? &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter (Southwood) (talk): 16:23, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

I notice that (at least with the version of the Android app I have installed) the new short-description template data is used for displaying articles, but the old Wikidata short descriptions are still used for search results. Is there a plan for using templated short descriptions for search results instead? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:27, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, the Android app should be updated within the next couple of weeks. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks! —David Eppstein (talk) 23:42, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Script for importing, addition and editing
Well, there's now User:Galobtter/Shortdesc helper.js, which makes it easier to add/edit/import short descriptions, by giving buttons to do so with an inputbox at the top. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:54, 19 April 2018 (UTC)