Manual talk:Managing data in MediaWiki

It seems to me like the rows "Stable releases", "Upgrade instructions" and "Installation" should all be removed, for different reasons... Andre Klapper made similar points in his email to mediawiki-l from a week ago. None of these rows really indicate anything about the quality of the software, or how easy it is to install/upgrade. And I think the "Installation" row, with its current data, is just incorrect - right now for all three extensions it says "easy (standard MediaWiki extension install)", and I think for both SMW and Wikibase, that's not the case - installation and upgrade may be easy, but it's not standard, because it involves more than one extension. Does anyone object to just removing them?

I agree. Also the row "Implementable on WMF wikis" currently just has question marks so could also be removed.

I posted a similar topic above before I read this. I think the 'installation' row is useful, but not accurate at the moment.

Btw, I don't think that Wikibase has stable releases. Finding a version that works with the version of core has been challenging. If you are lucky, the REL_XX branches work together with equivalent core, but those are not releases in the normal sense (tested, release notes, etc.).

REL_XX branches are the stable releases, and should always work with the equivalent core releases.

Not having separate releases and just releasing with mediawiki was decided as a release strategy some years ago now.

If you find a set of REL branches that do not work then please file a phabricator ticket, but really this shouldn't ever happen.

With all that said I find the statement that finding versions of things that work together to be a bit odd.

I've removed the "Complementary tools & services" and "Implementable on WMF wikis" rows are they have been empty for over a year now (diff).

Currently the 'Value declaration' row of Wikibase says "Using forms". What is it specifcally referring to in this case? Are there specific extensions or is it referring to the general wikidata interface?

It refers to the default Wikibase interface that provides form-based input of data.

All three of these say they're 'easy' to install. Personally, I find Wikibase a bit harder than the other two. I'm not really sure how to qualify that here though. I think it depends on what you're used to, with regard to extension installation. If you have a basic wiki, and install SMW or Cargo, nothing much changes until you start editing properties, templates etc.; but if you install Wikibase (although I've never run it in production, so I maybe shouldn't be commenting) there are often extra configuration steps required, and backwards-compatibility is not supported (which is totally fine, of course, but for your average non-professional wiki sysadmin can make things more complicated).

Could we say Wikibase has 'medium' installation difficulty?

It said "medium" until Addshore changed it here. I've never installed Wikibase, although from what I've heard it can't really be classified as an "easy" installation. On the other hand, this is a a pretty subjective metric - not quantifiable. It's not the kind of thing that usually shows up on mediawiki.org. I would say it's good reason to remove this row.

I put "medium" in the first place. At the time I first wanted to try it, I gave up (but this is some time ago).

I can only tell you that at Wikimania, several people in different workshops indicated that installing Wikibase is not easy. Even WM Germany people acknowledgte that and said that this is something they want to work on.

So I think it is very misleading to put "easy" on all three, because on a running MW instance, you just do some simple steps for SMW or Cargo and you are set.

So, everything regarding installation is a matter of opinion.

For Wikibase, if you read the small docs / installation guide page, which includes downloading the extension, adding a couple of lines to local settings and running install.php, then you have wikibase installed..

I imagine you do the same set of things for Cargo and SMW.

Thus I don't see why the installation of Wikibase should be medium but the other extensions discussed easy.

I think the extra complexity is mostly around having to set up multiple wikis and configure the sites table etc. Out of the box, after "normal" installation of the repo and client extensions, you don't get a very functional wiki (e.g. default sitelinks are Wikimedia references; search is ). If you want to do more, such as be able to query the data, there are more things to be set up.

For the other extensions here, after the most basic installation there's nothing much changed in a wiki, and most further configuration is done in wiki pages.

I'm not saying that it's hard to set up Wikibase, but it does feel to me to be out of the ordinary in the universe of MedaiWiki extensions.

I think it's probably also getting easier: for example am I right in thinking that the search box no longer defaults to just searching items?

Anyway, we're not going to have a hardness-rating on this comparison page, so all good. :-)

I think again this comes down to needing to define the thing we are comparing. "Installing" is easy, advanced configuration is more advanced, if you want it to be exactly like Wikidata, expect more pain.

What exactly does the "Result Formats" row mean? How does wikibase have 0 result formats? What is a result? What is a format?

Maybe we should call it "inline querying"?

What is special about SMW (and also Cargo) is, that you can on very wiki page you want query the available data and then decide if you want to do a |format=table for a tabular display or |format=json for an export or |format=calendar for a calendar display.

In my understanding this is a major difference to Wikibase, because afaik you need to do sparql queries or use external query/display services. Which are great, but a main difference IMO.

tried to explain it here: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Manual%3AManaging_data_in_MediaWiki&type=revision&diff=3465094&oldid=3465080

This could become a useful page.

With quite a lot of the rows, I wonder how relevant they are to a choice between the three options.

Also, unless there is a way to automatically obtain statistics, they should be marked as accurate on the date they were updated, as already some of it is out of date.

Which of these are implementable on WMF wikis (or closest to)? It's particularly relevant to the interests of the WikiJournal User Group, since handling data within mediawiki will make many tasks a lot easier and allow automation of several manual steps.

• Phabricator project
• Sister project proposal
• Technical wishlist
• Test wiki

Great idea, maybe you want to add a "Feature" row called "Implementable on WMF wikis"?