What if Wikidata had a "WikiProjects first" philosophy?
jan@aina.li
2025-10-31
Press O for overview.
About me
I ❤️ WikiProjects
What is a WikiProject
“not really a project...”
Where?
How?
Let's have a look at WikiProject every politician
Problem A
Wikidata is huge, which makes it difficult to monitor changes.
Problem B
WikiProjects are almost invisible.
Problem C
WikiProjects are built on-top of the software.
What if?
WikiProjects are built-in to the software.
I have some ideas
- Discovery
- Communication
- Workflow
Discovery
“You can't use what you don't know.”
For newcomers when signing up
Be shown a list of projects and be asked to sign up to a few.
Image by MMiller (WMF) licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Feature on main page
Curated feeds (like featured articles on Wikipedia) of WikiProjects.
Community updates
Have a rotating schedule for interested WikiProjects to feature something on Community updates.
'
Highlight WikiProject properties
Rather than having on focus list of Wikimedia project (P5008) and maintained by WikiProject (P6104) among all other properties, highlight them so that the editor knows there is help to get.
Communication
🤐
Ping project members
The Ping project template doesn't work properly in large WikiProjects.
Unified talk page feeds
Get a feed of all discussion pages related to a WikiProject.
Onwiki project chats?
A user can dream.
Workflow
“If all you have is a hammer”
Connecting items
For items not connected to a WikiProject, you could have a sidepane suggesting ones that could be related based on its statements.
Recent changes and watchlists
Similar to tags, filtering or marking based on WikiProjects.
Model items, showcase items and entity schemas
Model items, showcase items and entity schemas are great concepts that could be leveraged by WikiProjects.
A WikiProject could be nagged to have at least one of these implemented.
Higlight any related model items, showcase items or entity schemas when editing an item by default (not needing a userscript).
Warnings
Warn a user making certain types of edits to items related to a WikiProject (for instance changing instance of (P31) or subclass of (P279)).
It looks like you are changing this music album to be a song. If you are not sure this is correct, here is the data model of WikiProject Music.
Statistics
Improved and more automated statistics, both to track progress and demonstrate impact.
Work being done
WikiProjects is in development plan. 🎉
Currently work is being done on Increasing the visibility of WikiProjects (Discovery!).
Give feeback!
On the talk page.
Your ideas?
Contact
- Onwiki: User:Ainali
- Web: aina.li
- E-mail: jan@aina.li
- Mastodon: @ainali@social.coop
Acknowledgments
Proudly done in text using reveal.js, org-reveal, org-mode and gedit.
(All images have their own credits next to them.)