About the whole Wikidata / Wikipedia situation

I was meaning people like me who had never heard of WD before this conversation (even though I am an old git on the interwebs).

I’ll tweak the words to be more accurate - lolz.

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@paulakreuzer

Who gave you the OK to delete Wikipedia-URLs including the english one?

You start a topic here and don’t wait to reach an concensus?
Actually you have over 2’270 open “remove relationsship edits”.

Do I really have to down-vote them all manually until we reach an acceptable solution? With acceptable I mean, a solution that doesn’t only fits your idea?

Of course you can add as much Wikidata links you like, but there is no official policy so far that prohibits Wikipedia-Links. So please stop deleting them!

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There’s no consensus to reach - removing Wikipedia links is fine (that’s the official MusicBrainz position), and these edits should not be voted down.

If we want those links in the sidebar they should be autogenerated from Wikidata. That’s something that can be talked about and we can ask the dev team to implement it. They should not be stored separately risking them to become outdated.

That said, I feel removing them by hand is kind of a waste of time, honestly, since eventually they’ll just be bot-removed anyway.

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You say: First we delete all Wikipedia-Links (“risking them to become outdated”) and maybe - in 5 years or never - we will autogenerate them from Wikidata?

Is this the new way on MB? First to delete visible data (which at least some of us like to see) and hope that no one will ever insists?

And BTW: If that’s the (new) official MusicBrainz position please adjust all the style guides accordingly and
as fast as possible.

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The position is that people can add them, but if there’s a Wikidata link present there’s no reason they need to be kept. So nobody should vote No if someone adds one, but if someone has checked the WD link is present, they can be removed.

The only reason we haven’t done much in the way of guidelines about this interim period is that originally the idea was to get rid of all of them automatically in around 6 months (from the blog post announcement) - when that didn’t happen because nobody had the time, we got stuck with this in-between situation. But the goal is still very much to remove them.

The links are already being generated, and already linked from the overview page. If we want to show them on the sidebar too, that takes a developer around 20 minutes of coding max, and it’s not a reason to block the already decided removal - because no data is being lost with it.

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That phrase captures and expresses my level of technical expertise pretty well - I am like a tech deficient goldfish - one more circle of the goldfish bowl and everything is new and unfamiliar.

Scripts? LOL
Modify the INI file of a plugin? Hohoho.

And here is the bad part - I am more tech capable than say 90 % of the globe’s population. Or and least I am silly enough to think so.

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@InvisibleMan78 now that you heard from a MB style leader that my edit is not against the guidelines could you please revert your no-vote on it? Thanks.

@all: I rewrote my suggestion in STYLE-1003 to better reflect that adding Wikipedia links is fine and to include that removing/replacing them is accepted too.

Since the decision that they should be removed is 3 years old and a bot-solution doesn’t seem any closer now than it did then I think manually removing them is a viable thing to do. I’d say I removed about 15% of WP links already and by doing that I raised awareness and lots of people now add WD links instead of WP links.
I would also prefer if a bot did it, but a bot might not find errors as easily as I do. I’m also fixing some errors on the WD side along the way - I doubt a MB bot could do that.
Also I like to have a monotonous task I can do while e.g. watching TV or tanning. Before this I moved featured artists from titles to the artist credits, but I’m pretty much done with that for hip hop.

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I’ll tag this question on here instead of making a new thread.

Why does the Wikidata link on the right hand side of the page get a title of an ID number instead of “Wikidata” like all the other links?
image
I refer to my previous points that a large majority of people don’t recognise that Wikidata logo. If it at least said Wikidata instead of Q909006 then it would let those who are unaware of Wikidata click on it as it sounds Wikipedia like.

It would also be more consistent with all the other external links that name the website they are heading for and not some obscure meaningless number. :slight_smile:

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To be fair, we also have US: B0017PCMX0 for Amazon and VIAF: 12304462 for VIAF. Which suggests a middle ground here could be Wikidata: Q909006. I would like to keep the Q ID (because it’s the basis of Wikidata and quite important if you care about Wikidata as a user) but I agree it’s sadly not yet obvious to everyone how the Wikidata logo looks like and what it is :slight_smile:

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I guess Wikidata: Item/Artist Name (Q-ID) would be too long?

This would be better. It would also help people get to associate the wiggly line logo with Wikidata.

I can see why some people would need that ID number to be easily readable on the page. We always need to balance the need of the geek with the needs of the public. Wave something recognisable at them and it is more likely to be clicked.

If the Wikidata title is added to the icon then at least the new users can look up what Wikidata is and therefore more likely to add those links themselves.

And a side question. Any chance someone who understands Wikidata could update the MB help page a bit? Currently there is no explanation there as to how to get from Wikidata to Wikipedia. Or how to find a Wikidata page to add it to MB. Some good little nuggets of explanation in these forum threads that should be added to the help page.

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That would make sense. Which page you have in mind right now? :slight_smile:

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The page that pops up when I go and search for Wikidata:
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Wikidata

Still a bit basic and needs humanising.

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I submitted a patch for this change - hopefully it will be accepted (although I know the intention is to later on have a larger overhaul of the sidebar links, I feel it’s useful to make this one more clear in the meantime).

If anyone finds some time to improve this (from the wiki page) I can review this. Otherwise, I’ll try to find time myself in a few days - now quite overworked because of my board membership duties in, ironically, the Estonian Wikimedia chapter.

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So should we replace Wikipedia links with Wikidata ones or just add it?
I’m not 100% sure about this and the docs don’t talk much about it either, I’ve seen some entries in the past with Wikidata and Wikipedia URLs, I should have removed the URLs to Wikipedia?

Yes, you are correct - replace the Wikipedia links.

If you can point out where in the docs you were looking we can make it clearer!

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Here it says English Wikipedia links are always allowed: Style / Relationships / URLs - MusicBrainz then here Link Wikipedia And MusicBrainz - MusicBrainz says the preference is to link to Wikidata and the linked blogpost also states that there is no point in having Wikipedia and Wikidata links.

But Wikidata links should only be added to matching entity types: work with song, release group with single, etc.

So sometimes only the Wikipedia link(s) will be correct.

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I think this is a misunderstanding because of how that paragraph is worded. I have submitted an edit to the wiki page this is transcluded from, here, to make it clearer - could you review for transclusion please @reosarevok?

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@aerozol’s interpretation is entirely correct and the new wording more clear. Transcluded.

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