Wikidata:Requests for comment/Proposed client side disambiguation page

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THIS RFC IS CLOSED. Please do NOT vote nor add comments.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Technical issue, RFC not needed. RfC's don't decide about the development agenda of WMDE. If you want to request a new technical feature it makes more sense to write a phabricator ticket and/or wait till it's community wishlist season. ChristianKl (✉) 19:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Example of the proposed disambiguation page.

One of the major hurdles on Wikipedia is maintaining disambiguation pages. Such pages range from w:homographs to w:synonyms, former is more common but the later is not unusual at all. On Wikidata we have Special:ItemDisambiguation which is a bit of both. It does allow lookup of items by the label but it also includes items identified by aliases. If this is changed from only working on the repo to also working on the client, then we would have a working disambiguation page that includes more items than presently connected on Wikipedia. We could then link to local pages where those exist, but use the special page "AboutTopic" for all entries that don't exist locally. Such links should be visually different, and in the example they are shown in italics.

A page like this needs a clear and concise link, and I believe the correct place would be in the content sub right below the page title. It is related to the content, but it is not the content, so it should not be a page tab. (In technical terms it is not a page action.) It is although related to the contents title.

The data from the page should be available on a special page, but if it contains few enough entries it could open as a drop down menu. This menu would use Cards like in the article footer for related articles and the special page for mw:Beta Features/Nearby Pages. Only 8-10-12 -ish pages should be linked in a menu, if there are more pages then the user must go to the special page.

By exposing the labels, aliases, and descriptions like this at the clients the users at those projects will get more ownership to the entries in the items, thereby developing a sense of "working together". Because this will link to "AboutTopic" it will be a lot easier to find a starting point for creating new articles, not to forget a place to manage labels, aliases and descriptions for the disambiguation entries themselves.

Note that this discussion could go on Meta, as it relates to several projects, but it is most easily implemented as part of the Wikibase client. It will also have a pretty large impact on maintenance of items, they would be exposed a lot more and thus be edited more, so it seems wise to start the discussion on this project. It should although be up to the client projects to decide if they want to use the special page.

I have probably left out something,… Ask if you have any questions. Jeblad (talk) 14:35, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  •  Comment so to be clear - assuming we want this (it does sound good to me at the moment) this would be turned into a project (a series of phabricator tickets) for the developers, and then whatever comes out of that would be available to each language wiki? Have you discussed with anybody on the development team at all? ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:47, 4 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
It is a pretty small project to make the page, sbut the impact isn't small at all. The page as such should be localizable (ie internationalized) as there should be nothing language specific about it, as long as it does not include inflection rules. See also Wikidata:Contact the development team#Request for comment/Proposed client side disambiguation page. Jeblad (talk) 23:52, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment so Wikipedia disambiguation pages would become an editing interface for descriptions of Wikidata items likely to be found there? Sounds interesting.
    --- Jura 04:03, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I was thinking about links to Special:AboutTopic, but yes, it could also be an access point to the Q-items on Wikidata. The simplest version would simply be to link to Special:SetLabelDescriptionAliases. Jeblad (talk) 23:58, 6 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe just the description part.
--- Jura 17:57, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Comment Reasonator does exactly what you need it to do. I use it all the time. When you want something that works only for content in a project, it needs some coding because it is then to restrict itself to the local Wiki, It provides descriptions; automated descriptions out of the box. This will work in any language depending on the availability of labels. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 04:23, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
No, it is not even close to solving this problem. It is linking articles or placeholders for the articles at the client site, not linking items from the repo at an external site. Jeblad (talk) 04:27, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the links should be local, but the format could be something like https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?find=Douglas+Adams&lang=nb for nb:Douglas Adams (disambiguation). Reasonator is obviously more inclusive as it text searches descriptions as well.
--- Jura 17:57, 7 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
But it would be more like search than like disambiguation (which should refer only to labels and aliases). --Infovarius (talk) 00:21, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • When doing wireframes and seeking comments from an English speaking audience, it makes sense to have the wireframe in English. In general I do think this is a good idea but I think you do underrate the complexity of the project. At least the complexity if you want to have the new plugin integrated by a top10 Wikipedia.
① Users on a Wiki might want to put the item on their watchlist to make sure that there's no vandalism.
② Users will want to be able to edit this page. You need an editing interface that's clear about labels/descriptions/aliases. Users have to be informed that the content is stored on Wikidata in CC-0.
③ It would be nice if the items on the list could be sorted by their class
④ Showing the image of an item in front of the item could be a nice improvement over the status quo of disambiguation pages.
⑤ Your wireframe doesn't make it clear whether you only want to show the items that have articles on a given Wiki or whether you want to show more than that. ChristianKl (talk) 22:03, 25 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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