Wikidata live on the English Wikipedia

Lydia Pintscher

13. February 2013

(Die deutsche Version dieses Artikels ist hier.)

After the deployment of the first phase of Wikidata on the Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias we have added English to the list today.

This means language links on that Wikipedia are now also coming from Wikidata. This is yet another step on the way to moving towards a system where language links are stored in one central place (as opposed to the wikitext of each article on each Wikipedia).

What is going to happen exactly?

Language links in the sidebar will automatically come from Wikidata, once the article is linked on Wikidata. No special syntax is needed for that.
Existing language links in the wikitext will continue to work and overwrite links from Wikidata.
For individual articles, language links from Wikidata can be suppressed completely with the noexternallanglinks magic word.
Changes on Wikidata that relate to articles on this Wikipedia show up in Recent Changes and Watchlist, if the option is enabled by the user. (There are still some issues with this when you have enhanced recent changes enabled.)
At the bottom of the language links list you will see a link to edit the language links that leads you to the linked page on Wikidata.
You can see an example of how it looks in the article about Maria Goeppert-Mayer.
The second phase of Wikidata (which is about claims/infoboxes) was started on Wikidata, but can’t yet be used on any Wikipedia. This will follow later.

An FAQ is here.

What’s next?

The first parts of phase 2 have been deployed on wikidata.org. We are working on the missing parts of phase 2 now. This includes for example the ability to enter dates and geocoordinates.

At the same time we’re preparing the deployment on all remaining Wikipedias. This was planned for February 27, but due to a number of meetings at the Wikimedia Foundation offices this might be moved a few days back or forth. We will keep you updated.

UPDATE: The new date is March 6.