About the whole Wikidata / Wikipedia situation

There’s a problem with that. When you’re looking at a release group, you have that “Read more…” link, but when you’re looking at a release, all you have is the WD link in the sidebar. It’s kind of annoying to have to click on that link then scroll to the bottom to find the WP link and click it. And as @IvanDobsky says, not everyone knows about the relationship between WP and WD, so a lot of users are just going to see an unfamiliar link and ignore it.

I’d much rather have the generated WP link right under the WD link in the sidebar.

4 Likes

Which one is “the” generated link? English?

2 Likes

The one for your language. Isn’t that the way they’re generated now?

4 Likes

As @Billy_Yank suggest, put a Wikipedia link under the Wikidata one.

From what little understanding I have of Wikidata isn’t it possible to lookup the language of the browser and then supply the relevant link?

2 Likes

We should indeed add the user script sidebar WD to WP feature to MBS.

4807c70e44fe16e27edac166b74a57665b84f19b%20(2)

I have added a ticket:

9 Likes

@jesus2099 that is the logic I was thinking. Though I would still add the Wikipedia logo on those links as I am thinking about the dumb ID-10T user that is here at MB doing research.

Shouldn’t MB know what language the user requires automatically? I know that there is a Language option as when I login that lets me swap to French/German/etc. I would have assumed that the Browser is telling the MB site which language it would prefer.

I tried swapping settings around just now but it still insisted in giving me the top Wikipedia text in English. So I am clearly missing something as I assumed that was the point of having a Wikidata link? It should allow more flexibility and better handling of language options for the MB interface.

2 Likes

If you are using my script, the default setting is to use your own favourite languages you have set in your browser, in that particular order, then, if adds the current MB selected language.
Click the clockwork to change this setting to a fixed language list, for instance.

It should display WP logo indeed: WD to WP should use WP icons · Issue #404 · jesus2099/konami-command · GitHub


update: It has actually already been displaying the correct logo for months or years, as you can see:

:+1:

2 Likes

I’ll refer back to my noob status and not having a clue how these scripts work.

My posts here are more about pointing out how users who are not computer geeks see and use this site. How the musical geek will come here to learn about bands, releases and mine the high quality data here. These music geeks are not going to know how to use a “browser script”.

IMHO the default site without scripts should be usable by dumb users. Sure, enhance the site for personal use with scripts - but don’t forget the majority of us haven’t a clue how those scripts work.

(I don’t want to take this thread OT by talking about scripts… seriously - I am an IT geek and I still haven’t been able to find any simple documentation to take me into those mysteries… so don’t expect Music Geeks to understand them! :laughing:)

4 Likes

I totally agree that it should be part of MBS (I thought a ticket did already exist but no so I have just created a new one, linked here yesterday above).

In general I create a script when I cannot wait for a feature to be added to MBS, when I really need it for my personal use of MB (basically, list my records. To discover new stuff through cataloguing and to not buy doubles).

3 Likes

Yesterday I started to remove the Wikipedia links from some Romanian artist pages.
Then I realized that, actually, for a regular internet user, WikiData means nothing - or worse, it can mean something esoterical, something they have no time and patience to learn about. So they will have no idea that they have to click the Wikidata link and then they will find all the Wikipedia links.

And then, I think it’s better to leave all the links: WikiData, English Wikipedia and Romanian (I mean the native ) language, because that will make it easier for the regular internet users.

2 Likes

There is still the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article in the language you set MB to (if it exists) with the “continue reading at Wikipedia” link which is much more useful than an english + native WP link if you don’t speak either language.

That’s true, but mostly for the Enlglish readers.

On the other hand for the Romanian users who don’t speak English, that’s not so helpful. For them, it’s more useful to have a link to the Romanian Wikipedia. For example the Vali Vijelie page

But I must admit that in the same time, if they don’t know how to use the English Wikipedia link in order to get to the Romanian Wikipedia article, then probably they won’t know what the :ro Wikipedia link is good for.

1 Like

A Romanian user with no English will be very confused with the current MB site, I’m afraid - the Wiki link is the least of their problems. That said, if someone eventually produced a Romanian translation, I think if someone was using it it would default to Romanian for Wikipedia as well :slight_smile:

5 Likes

@OneMusicDream A Romanian would recognise the Wikipedia logo on the right hand side. They are unlikely to know what a Wikidata logo is (or how to make sense of it) I know I had never seen that WD logo before this thread.

I do not understand why the both links can not be left available. Why delete perfectly good and valid data. Why remove accessibility for other people?

I know some users keep pointing to the text at the top of the artist page that quotes some of the Wikipedia article - but other people will go direct to the links on the right hand side.

Every user uses a website differently. IMHO gathering the external links together makes it much clearer as to where to find further information. I’ll often click down many of those, opening pages in the background. This is made less easy if I have to jink back to the main artist page as well.

Also note that some albums have separate pages in wikipedia.

Yeah - great - Wikidata for the database addicts who know what that site is. But PLEASE remember normal people who barely have a grip on how the internet works. Please keep the site accessible to them too.

As a test, next time you are in the supermarket ask 20 random people what “Wikidata” is. Then ask the same 20 people what “Wikipedia” is.

5 Likes

Yes, its a total pain removing the wikipedia links. I am going to have to go through the whole MusicBrainz database and recreate the wikipedia links from the wikidata links. My customers dont want to see wikidata in their tags and making additional calls to wikipedia to convert these links on the fly is too expensive slowing down the tagging.

5 Likes

Because WP pages are often removed or renamed, in long term.

2 Likes

Are they really, where is your evidence ?

There is no easy way to find all the URL I had to fix in the past.
The most often case is that your page (album, artist, song) is turned into a disambiguation page someday.
Then some bands are deleted as being not notable enough for WP, but that’s not as frequent as first case.
Sometimes also, they fix the page title → URL
But there is no easy way to find those edits back…
WD is made exactly to avoid this.

4 Likes

Well Im not advocating removing the wikidata, but I dont think the fact that a wikipedia link may change is a good reason to not have wikipedia links, most dont change, you could apply that logic to any url from any source

Regarding bands being deleted for not being notable enough, are you saying that their wikidata is never removed even if there are now no pages actually referring to the wikidata.

WD is made exactly to avoid this.

I don’t that is the reason it was created, I think it was created to allow data to be shared on multiple pages rather than having multiple copies.

1 Like

At least one of the purposes of WD is to have a permanent link that collects all the temporary links to WP, Wikimedia, Wikiquote, … That’s why the WD urls contain numeral IDs (like we do with MBIDs) and not names (like WP does).
If a Wikipedia page gets removed, renamed, redirected or whatever the Wiki editors will edit the WD page. So it makes no sense for us to keep our own - always out of date - collection of temporary links if we can simply link to the permanent collection of links provided by the project themselves.
Sure it’s neat to optionally display direct links to WP, but that should be achieved by integrating the script mentioned multiple times before which will almost always supply correct links and not by manually adding temporary links to WP articles in arbitrarily chosen languages that will be displayed to everybody.
This discussion is going in cycles btw.

9 Likes