Critical issues presentations/A much-needed push: Making Infoboxes first class citizens
- Submission no. 92
- Title of the submission
A much-needed push: Making Infoboxes first class citizens
- Author of the submission
- Marius Hoch
- Country of origin
Germany
- Topics
Technical
- Keywords
- Wikidata
- Infobox
- Content
- Abstract
Using the newly developed features and the steadily increasing amount of data on Wikidata we can enhance the way content is being provided and managed within the whole Wikimedia movement
Many Wiki pages feature so called Infoboxes which are simple tables containing basic facts about the page's subject. Traditionally the data these Infoboxes contain is stored in the wikitext of each page. There are several problems attached to that. For instance, when these basic facts change (for example when the mayor of a city changes or a there's a new version of a software) all language versions of Wikipedia that have an article about a given subject need to be updated in order to reflect that change. That's a time consuming task for editors and can lead to outdated information in case no one regularly updates that data.
Now that Wikidata exists as a central data store for Wikimedia projects and Wikibase, the software behind the Wikidata project, is steadily improving, these problems can be solved in a more convenient way. Also with Capiunto Infoboxes can easily be assembled using Lua in a manner that is simple and works consistently across projects, while still being very flexible and giving editors full control of how the information will be displayed.
For starters this presentation will give an overview of the data structure of Wikidata. After that it will be shown how that data can be used on Wiki pages that are linked with Wikidata (for example on Wikipedia). The presentation will feature both made up example Infoboxes and real world examples of (partly) dataless Infoboxes from Wikipedia.
On top of that, the current state of the magic Infobox implementation will be explained and briefly demoed. Magic Infoboxes are a planned feature that allows for Infoboxes to be defined outside of the article content itself and they make various things easier. The most notable improvements that magic Infoboxes introduce are easier to maintain, they are highly portable across wikis and they are easier to read and write for machines. Additionally the next steps in that regard will be presented.
After the presentation there will be a question and answer session with the author of the submission and other Wikidata developers.
- Result
Not accepted