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Discovering property IDs

The Wikidata team wrote:

Use a parser function like {{#property:p169}} in the wiki text of the article on Yahoo!. This will return “Marissa Mayer” as she is the chief executive officer of the company.

So I go to d:Marissa Mayer. Doesn't exist.

I figure out that it's d:Q14086 that I actually want. I take a look at the page.

Here's what I see:

  • no mention of "Q14086";
  • no mention of "chief executive officer" or "p169"; and
  • no mention of "company" or "q37093".

Whattttttttttttt.

Explanation: d:Q14086 is the item for Marissa Mayer. That's not actually the one you want in this particular example. You want to show the information in the article about Yahoo!. The corresponding item for that is d:Q37093. One can for example get there by clicking edit links in the sidebar of Yahoo!. This item has all the information you were looking for. A link there can for example also be added to the infobox in the form of a small edit icon so it is more obvious how to get there. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Okay, I reach d:Q37093 and see the "chief executive officer" field. This is great, just what I want for the Yahoo! article. Now how do I figure out how to include it? How do I retrieve the magic key "p169"?
It's the id of the property. You can get it from the URL that chief executive officer is linked to. Not perfect of course which is why we're working on making it possible to use chief executive officer instead of the id. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:45, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
I see a problem in that the labels of properties can be very volatile (cf main entity (GND)). I'm not sure it's a good idea to make the use of Wikidata dependent on labels. --Izno (talk) 18:40, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Do you specifically mean vandalism or smth else?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:42, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Well, there's that too, but I mean in general. Property labels aren't a) locked down (per "wiki"), and b) not all properties have labels in all languages. So the minute a label changes, what happens? Everything gets broken? What about label conflicts? I doubt that a conflict would occur, but it certainly could, especially given the fact that there are so many languages. What happens when a label gets desynched e.g. pt differs from pt-br on a particular item? Can both be called for a page? I'm simply not confident that all hell won't break loose if we allow people to use labels instead of property IDs. --Izno (talk) 19:55, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Editing properties

When items are included, how do you edit them?

I go to test2wiki:GNU. Then what?

Explanation: You click "edit links" in the sidebar or improve the template to show an edit icon or something completely different we have not come up with yet. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:25, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
"Edit links" isn't visible at all. I clicked the very prominent "edit" tab and reached <https://test2.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GNU&action=edit>. What do I do here?
Edit links only shows up if sitelinks are enabled, which they may not be so I guess it's not a perfect solution. Legoktm (talk) 16:40, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
It does show up for me. But it's not perfect, yes. Which is why I mentioned adding a little edit icon to the infobox for example. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:42, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
With a short article, I have to scroll down maybe two or three screens before seeing "edit links" (if it's there at all).

Why would I think to click "edit [sidebar] links" in order to edit an infobox?

Someone has now helpfully added [edit data] to the infobox at test2wiki:GNU, but that seems like a poor solution generally. It's an edit link that doesn't lead to an edit screen. It's an edit link that casually takes the user to another site altogether. Perhaps the properties themselves should be links to Wikidata. Or perhaps they should have tooltips with edit links. Or perhaps there should be built-in editing on the Wikipedia side. For sure, the main edit screen (action=edit) needs improvement (like the list of properties used on the page, with edit links, like templates have). The info action (action=info) also could probably use some improvement to incorporate Wikidata data.

This needs a lot more thought and development, in my opinion. These reasons are why I don't believe a full-scale deployment here is a good idea yet.

There are a lot of things that still need to be done and this is exactly why we need to bring it up here. Until now no-one has even brought up adding used properties to the edit window. I'll ask and see if that is technically doable.
As for the other points: We're in contact with the visual editor team and will have to work out ways to integrate this as well as local editing. But this will not happen in an initial version. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:19, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Ok I asked about showing the used properties in the edit window. It's possible if the parser function is used but it seems not when Lua is used. (The reason is that with Lua you can just get the whole data item and then work on parts of that.) Would it still be useful/good to show it for the parser function? What do you think --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:27, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure. Having an incomplete list is sometimes worse than having no list at all. Presumably the system will have to track usage of properties so that it can be purge them (update them) when they change. So it shouldn't be too difficult to generate a list of properties on a per-page basis. This should have a bug, I guess.

Searching and linking

Has the Wikidata team looked at making a prefix that would implicitly go to the bytitle for the current wiki? E.g.:
wdbytitle:Barack Obama would be equivalent to d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/Barack Obama if you make the link on enwiki. It would infer which db name to put in the link based on the current wiki. This is a little magical, but it's not complicated and makes linking easier in some cases. Superm401 - Talk 21:33, 9 April 2013 (UTC)
I have not thought about this yet but it does sound like a good idea. I will bring it up and see if it is possible. Thanks! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:13, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
I have filed this as bugzilla:47124. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:33, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Possible improvements

Add "properties used on this page" list below the textarea when editing a page (similar to "templates used on this page")


Add "properties used on this page" list to the info action?


Keep editing local

  • As the Americans might say, "go to some super-wiki that's overrun by robots to change an infobox value? ain't nobody got time for that." Definitely need a better strategy here. If possible, keep editing interface local. iframe maybe? Something sillier? Something less silly?
  • Generally we want to avoid: [edit] links that don't go to an edit window.
Thank you for the suggestions! I'll bring them up and see what is technically possible and get back here. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:14, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Ok so listing the used properties is partly possible. See #Editing_properties please. Is there anything else than that you'd like to see in the info action?
Local editing is planned but will not be there initially. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:43, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
Then we'll need to figure out how to make the current situation as least painful as possible. We cannot have {{#p123}} or whatever in an article without providing a clear workflow for how to retrieve that number, how to call other properties, and how to easily change this property's value.

Though, really, any workflow that involves leaving the site you're working on to make a change is going to be pretty painful, I think. There's no getting around that, other than supporting local editing. :-/

Let's just commons-ize this thing

Why not just use the same system that is used for treaty membership maps:

  • You click on the picture of the map
  • you get taken to the intra-WP site with all the info about the map (we could skip this step)
  • you click the link to the commons site about the map (we could skip this step)
  • you get taken to the commons site with all the information about the map
  • you edit things there in the usual way

So why not just have an edit this box link that takes you to a WD site with all the information from that box in the same order, which you then edit like you can edit this page here: [1] - one line at a time? Maybe dress it up a bit, but that's the basic idea. A similar system is already being used inside EnWP for things like this. --U5K0'sTalkMake WikiLove not WikiWar 19:56, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

It's not clear whether property usage is being tracked in a way that would support this feature currently. That is, for this to work, Wikidata would need to know that the English Wikipedia's "Barack Obama" article uses properties from Wikidata and additionally know which properties are being used and in which order on the page. That's quite a lot of data to track for every page on every wiki. :-) (Wikidata is designed to be used not only with Wikimedia wikis, but presumably any MediaWiki wiki.)
I think any workflow that involves forcing users to leave their current wiki and travel to another wiki with a completely different editing interface is going to be pretty painful. Perhaps it won't be as bad as I think.

Resources

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