Requests for comment/Interproject links interface

The following request for comments is closed. Already done by the Wikidata team and deployed. --Rs chen 7754 21:26, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Interproject links are the set of links that convey to the user the existence of pages relative to the subject in other sister projects (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Commons, etc.). This RFC has the aim to ask the communities for their opinion on proposed interfaces that would allow storing the interproject links in a central location, such as Wikidata. See also bugzilla:708.

Current situation

Interproject links are represented in several ways depending on the language and on the sister project. However, no matter the project, the links are stored as text. This is a similar problem to interlanguage linking, which is being addressed by Wikidata.

Wikipedia

Wikipedias have tended towards two solutions: either with templates at the bottom of the page, or with an "other projects" link collection on the left bar.

The English Wikipedia normally uses individual sibling project templates, like {{commons}}. (There's also Template:Sister project links to create a box with links at the bottom of the page, but it tends to generate default links to Special:Search on each target project if the destination pages are unspecified - an ugly kludge. See w:en:Shakespeare#External_links). On the other hand the Italian Wikipedia uses Template:Interprogetto which places the interproject links on the left-hand bar (see w:it:Dante Alighieri, "Altri progetti"). The Spanish-language Wikipedia uses both links at the bottom and the ledft bar (see w:es:Historia.)

Putnik implemented script recently with functionality similar to mw:Extension:RelatedSites, but link are taken from Wikidata. This script was enabled for all users of Russian Wikipedia.

Wikisource

On the Wikisources, besides of the approaches used by Wikipedia, a third one is used on author pages, where the links to other projects are either placed on templates on top of the page (see the French Wikisource s:fr:Auteur:Victor Hugo) or on a infobox on the right side of the page (see the German Wikisource s:de:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).

Sometimes certain texts contain also links to Wikipedia that are placed either on the left bar, or on an overlaving template (this page on the Catalan Wikisource contains an example of both: s:ca:Enllà, where "Informació sobre el text" links to Wikipedia and on the left bar too).

Note, that some wikisource sites (eg. svwikisource or plwikisource) use sometimes multiple interwiki links to different pages in a single project to compare pages using doublewiki (eg. s:sv:Vårt land or s:pl:Królowa Śniegu (Andersen, przekł. Matuszewski)).

Wiktionary

Some Wiktionaries prefer to use the "links on the left bar" option. A Wiktionary article may link with several articles in Wikipedia, one for each definition and project (see the German Wiktionary wikt:de:Wiktionary:Autorenportal, "Schwesterprojekte:" on the left bar).

Wikivoyage

A Wikivoyage article has links to other Wikivoyage language versions on the left bar, and additionally a link to Wikipedia in the language of the article and a link to the Commons category. This is done by an extension which moves every [[wikipedia: or [[commons: link to the sidebar, often with unexpected results when editors attempt to use these prefixes normally. The list of prefixes to move to the sidebar is hard-coded into one of the server config files, which is inflexible; "Wikipedia" and "Commons" also have been seen offered in Special:Preferences as languages because of this non-standard extension. The Wikivoyage interlanguage links are currently maintained by bot; the most common link targets are wikipedia:, commons:category: and DMOZ.

Wikivoyage uses mw:Extension:RelatedSites.

Commons

Certain categories include the Template:Creator, which places the interproject links as icons on top of the box (see Category:Cicero). The links to Wikipedias are just language interwikilinks, but they still don't fetch from Wikidata and Wikipedias still have to link back with manual {{Commonscat}} or equivalents.

Content card prototype

Prototype to represent a Wikidata concept as a way to unify information from different Wikimedia projects.

Based on all the proposals gathered, and the issues raised, User:Tpt has created an early prototype of a content card. To activate it, follow these steps:

Go to your common.js file. For a user named "Test" in English Wikipedia, it would be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Test/common.js
Modify it and paste this line: mw.loader.load('//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Tpt/interproject.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
Save and go to any Wikipedia page
You should see an icon next to the article title, if you don't, refresh your browser cache. Instructions: Internet Explorer: hold down the Ctrl key and click the Refresh or Reload button. Firefox: hold down the Shift key while clicking Reload (or press Ctrl-Shift-R). Google Chrome and Safari users can just click the Reload button.

What it does:

It displays an icon next to the article title
When you hover your mouse over the icon it shows a content card.
The content card displays information from Wikidata: label, image, link to Commons gallery, and link to edit Wikidata.

What it is supposed to do in the future when Wikidata supports sister projects:

It will display contents or links to sister projects
See also this mockup.

Comments

It is not working for me. I see that the JS is getting loaded and running (used Chrome dev tools to check) but I see no icon. Can you tell me what might be wrong? Here's my User:Klortho/common.js Klortho (talk) 03:45, 3 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's the Wikidata API that redirect an HTTPS request to an other URL but in HTTP, that makes Chrome block the URL. I have fixed this issue by making the API request directly to the good URL. So it should works fine now. Tpt (talk) 13:33, 3 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If our goal is to make the links more prominent, this really fails. Most casual readers will never, ever notice this. -- Ypnypn (talk) 12:51, 19 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
- I think the proposal B with icons and numbers might be more visible if the icons are bigger, however it still needs some work and we cannot really test it because integration with Wikidata has not happened yet. After we have more data it should be possible to run some A/B tests and see which option works better. As said, still a long way to go.--Micru (talk) 14:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Adding Wikivoyage is not consensus on de.WP (see here), whereas adding Wikispecies is prohibited on de.WP. --Cú Faoil (talk) 17:44, 30 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]