Wikidata:Requests for comment/Should previously linked Wikipedia articles be separated?
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.
- stale --Emu (talk) 12:16, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
| An editor has requested the community to provide input on "Should previously linked Wikipedia articles be separated?" via the Requests for comment (RFC) process. This is the discussion page regarding the issue.
If you have an opinion regarding this issue, feel free to comment below. Thank you! |
THIS RFC IS CLOSED. Please do NOT vote nor add comments.
Wikipedia articles from different languages were linked together before Wikidata. This was done with interwiki links (e.g. [[en:Blood pressure]] at the bottom for French Wikipedia article fr:Pression artérielle). Then Wikidata was created and those links were migrated to it.
Question[edit]
Wikidata items names are more precise than Wikipedia articles names. So should Wikipedia articles about a subject, which were all previously linked together, be split into two different but closely related Wikidata items?
Examples[edit]
- fr:Pression artérielle linked to en:Blood pressure (and vice-versa), but Wikidata has two items for those: blood pressure (Q82642) and arterial blood pressure (Q9062560).
- political campaign (Q847301) and election campaign (Q11642595)
- Re (Q611130) and RE (Q20987254)
The problem[edit]
Currently, if Wikipedia articles are split between different Wikidata items, the Wikipedia interwiki links won't work anymore. Only the articles linked inside the same Wikidata item will be visible in a Wikipedia article. e.g. fr:Pression artérielle doesn't currently include an interwiki link to en:Blood pressure (and vice-versa). Note that en:Arterial pressure (English for "Pression sanguine") redirects to en:Blood pressure and that fr:Pression sanguine (French for "Blood pressure") redirects to fr:Pression artérielle.
Discussion[edit]
- I think they should be separate even though it makes the interwiki links worse. BrokenSegue (talk) 17:31, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
- Even before Wikidata, interwikilinks were supposed to be added based on a 1:1 correspondence of topics. It was practically impossible to get this done with the old decentralized system, thus lots of somewhat related topics were interwikilinked as well. Wikidata has untangled a substantial part of the chaos, fortunately.
If interwikilinks should be kept where the sitelinks have been separated now—and there may be good reasons to do so—other mechanisms can be used. Oldschool interwikilinks in Wikipedia can still be used to overwrite interwikilinks from Wikidata. This can even partially be automated with templates/modules. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:24, 18 October 2021 (UTC)- This help page also recommends oldschool interwiki links as a possible solution. --Tengwar (talk) 21:12, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
- It should be easier to link to redirects, so that w:fr:Pression artérielle (article) → arterial blood pressure (Q9062560) → w:en:Arterial pressure (redirect) → w:en:Blood pressure (article) → blood pressure (Q82642) → w:fr:Pression sanguine (redirect) → w:fr:Pression artérielle (article). This allows functional navigation w:fr:Pression artérielle (article) ←→ w:en:Blood pressure (article), but with more semantic plumbing behind the scenes. Some way of categorising or tagging redirects to distinguish independent concepts (deserving data items) from spelling variants or alternate labels would be nice, but this would have to be coordinated across numerous Wikipedia language communities. Perhaps a MediaWiki magic word? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 18:49, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
- These might be useful: en:Template:Wikidata redirect and en:Template:Redirect with possibilities. See also: Help:Handling sitelinks overlapping multiple items#Redirects. --Tengwar (talk) 21:24, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
- Redirects are the solution to handle those cases. Hopefully, we will soon have the ability to create redirects without the current workaround. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 16:26, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
Proposal to close RfC[edit]
Info I propose to close this RfC as stale after 31 January 2024. Please comment if you don’t agree. --Emu (talk) 20:27, 13 January 2024 (UTC)