Extension:Wikibase EDTF

PW

The Professional Wiki team maintains this extension professionally.

Professional Wiki provides official support for MediaWiki LTS releases only. It may work with other MediaWiki releases.

MediaWiki extensions manual

Wikibase EDTF Release status: stable
Description	Adds support for the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) Specification via a new data type
Author(s)	Jeroen De Dauwtalk
Maintainer(s)	Professional Wiki
Latest version	2.1.1 (2023-03-31)
Compatibility policy	For every MediaWiki release that is a Long Term Support release there is a corresponding branch in the extension.
MediaWiki	1.37-1.39 (2.x) 1.35-1.36 (1.x)
PHP	7.4+
Database changes	No
Composer	professional-wiki/wikibase-edtf
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	GitHub: project page git repository URL [help ] commit history README CHANGELOG
Example	edtf.wikibase.wiki (demo wiki)
Hooks used WikibaseRepoDataTypes WikibaseClientDataTypes
Compatibility Wikibase Repository REL1_37-REL1_39 (2.x), REL1_35-REL1_36 (1.x)

The Wikibase EDTF extension adds support for the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) Specification to Wikibase via a new data type.

This extension has been created and is maintained by Professional Wiki. The Luxembourg Ministry of Culture funded initial development.

You can find a demo of this extension at https://edtf.wikibase.wiki.

See the documentation for detailed installation and usage instructions or the demo video for a short introduction.

This extension is included in the official Wikibase Docker image releases since Wikibase version 1.36.

Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF)

EDTF is part of ISO 8601-2:2019, which defines various extensions to ISO 8601 standard, such as uncertainties. For the implementation of the project the development team followed the publicly available concise description of the standard on the specification site of the U.S. Library of Congress.

The implementation supports:

• Dates
• Date and time
• Time Intervals
• Letter-prefixed calendar year
• Seasons
• Qualification of a date
• Unspecified digit(s) from the right
• Negative calendar years
• Exponential years
• Significant digits
• Sub-year groupings
• Set representations
• Qualifications
• Unspecified Digits
• Intervals

Structure

The extension is divided into two libraries. One Library is a standalone PHP EDTF interpretation and humanisation library. It can be found at ProfessionalWiki/EDTF. Note that the library can be used independently from this extension.

This library is wrapped by this extension that interacts with the library and provides further functionality, e.g. GUI and export to RDF.

Functionality

The extension provides the user with an open text field where they can put in any text. Upon saving this text is validated against proper formatting of EDTF. If the string is not properly formatted the string is not saved. The users will be presented with an error message.

When the string is a valid EDTF-date it is saved. In the GUI a 'humanised' string is generated that transforms the string to a short sentences that is human readable.

Example humanisation

[2021-02-15, 2021-02-16, 2021-32, 2020-XX-11]

becomes

One of these:

• February 15th, 2021
  
• February 16th, 2021
  
• Winter (Southern Hemisphere) 2021
  
• 11th of unknown month, 2020

Interface translations

The extension is being translated via translatewiki.net. Its project can be found here.

See also

• Extended Date Time Format Support for Wikibase — Blog post on the occasion of the extension's release providing a general overview
• Extended Date Time Format Support for Wikibase — Video on using the Wikibase Local Media extension