Wikidata Bridge/Development

Edit Wikidata’s data directly from your infobox

Who's working on the project? The first part of this feature will be developed by the Wikidata development team at Wikimedia Deutschland (including: engineering team, product manager, UX designers, community communication). In the future, the Wikimedia Foundation could also work on it, when it comes to the integration into Wikipedia.

How do we work? In order to make sure that we’re building a tool that is answering editors’ needs, we’re using agile methods in our development process. We don’t start with a fixed idea of the tool we want to deliver: we will build it together with the communities, based on feedback loops that we will regularly organize. We don’t wait to have a “finished” product to deploy it: we will start enabling features step by step, deploy small chunks over the next months, try it with the editors on a trial & error basis. The first version will not necessarily have all of the features you want, but it will keep evolving.

What is our goal?

Here are the things we want to achieve:

Reduce the amount of outdated data in infoboxes
Reduce the amount of (unintentionally) conflicting data between infoboxes in different projects
Higher quality data on Wikidata
More data for readers on all wikis (especially smaller ones)
Less data overall to maintain per editor on the Wikimedia projects
Make Wikidata feel less distant for editors from the other Wikimedia projects

How is it going to work?

We want to create an interface that will be accessible from an infobox template on Wikipedia (for example with an “edit” link located in the infobox), that will allow people to edit the values that are stored in Wikidata and displayed in this infobox.

Planned features for the first version (minimal viable product)

Ability to open a local editor on Wikipedia that enables editing Wikidata values
Editing a simple value from Wikidata (eg. date or number of inhabitants, not a value that links to another Item)
Provide different paths depending on if people want to edit the value (because it’s entered wrong in Wikidata) or update it (eg because the number of inhabitants changed)

Planned features for the next steps

Editing values that have any datatype (eg mayor of a city)
Easier switching between local values and values coming from Wikidata
Editing local values and values coming from Wikidata in the same interface integrated to the Visual Editor
Adding or editing values for a property that is not already used in the infobox
Editing values on items other than the one connected via a sitelink

What is not part of this project

Here are the features that will not be part of the first steps of development. They may be achieved later in the future.

Creating new Items when no existing one is found
Showing Wikidata edits on the history of the Wikipedia article
Editing data on Properties and Lexemes

What is going to change?

On Wikipedias and other projects
- A new feature of the Wikibase Client extension will be enabled
On infoboxes
- The infoboxes maintainers will need to adapt the templates to get the new feature. If it’s not done, the infoboxes will continue to work as they are currently, so the template builders make the choice if they want to enable editing Wikidata’s data or not
- On adapted infoboxes, a link or icon (for example “edit Wikidata’s data”) will open the editing interface
On Wikidata
- A tag for edits coming from Wikidata Bridge will be added
- More Wikipedia editors will start editing Wikidata