Topic on Talk:Structured Data Across Wikimedia

I recently developed the idea of creating dedicated Wikidata items for Wikipedia articles.

This stems from currently unfixable Wikidata item conflation problems created by Wikipedia articles across languages describing different things and then being sitelinked together on one item.

I described and shared this solution and problem with the Wikidata and Wikipedia communities.

However, as part of the discussion on Wikipedia, I came to the conclusion that using Multi-Content-Revisions like this project plans to do might be better solution than creating items for every one of the 57 million+ individual Wikipedia articles. Just as Commons stores it's own structured data, Wikipedia should probably as well. Wikidata should only act as a repository that stores data about the general universe, and not anything specific to Wikimedia.

How this would work is Wikipedia editors using the proposed Wikipedia article metadata editor would add a main subject (P921) statement to describe the overall subject of the Wikipedia article. Then, the article would sitelink to other language Wikipedia articles by finding articles that also have the same main subject (P921) statement.

Let me know your thoughts!

I agree, although it's painful.

We have a big problem with the interwiki link system, and Wikidata is unwilling or unable to fix it. Wikidata is designed on a premise of a unique 1-to-1 mapping of concepts. At best that is simply wrong, and at worst it is effectively culturally imperialistic. The fact is that different languages can and do divide up concepts in different ways. In practice Wikidata generally treats English as the One True Language, and effectively screws over any foreign language that doesn't conform to English. For example:

There's a language, I think Polish(?), with a word for "children's playground ride, with a seat connected to a pivot point so it can move back and forth". In English we have one word for such a device in a vertical orientation - we call it a swing. We have a different word for such a device in a horizontal orientation - we call it a see saw. Both English articles need to link to the same foreign article, and the foreign article needs links to both English articles. (Preferably with some brief clarifying text attached.) Wikidata can't or won't do that.

It's known as the "Bonnie and Clyde" problem, because some Wikis have one article on Bonnie and Clyde as a famous couple, while other wikis have a separate biography for each person. However in my opinion that is an unhelpful and misleading name for the problem. It can lead people to think it's merely some issue with the Wikis, that it could fixed if the wikis simply agreed to work together and do the articles the same way. No no no. Languages do not always divide up concepts the same way. Languages can divide up colors differently - for example considering Blue and Green to merely be different shades of a single color. Colors shade smoothly into each other, and defining the borders of what constitutes a "different" color is a completely arbitrary human definition. Different languages can and do divide up concepts differently. It is abusive and broken to tell some other language that their concept-divisions are not equally legitimate, to tell them that they are somehow "wrong".

I called it painful because it will kinda suck to maintain both the existing Wikidata item links in addition to a new interwiki link system. But this has been a long term problem, and Wikidata can't or won't solve it.

P.S. Lectrician1 suggested "add a main subject (P921) statement [] sitelink to other language Wikipedia articles [with] the same main subject (P921) statement." That doesn't work, that is essentially the same functionality we have now with the same problem we have now. We need greater functionality. We need the English articles on Swing and See Saw to both link to the same Polish(?) article. And there are likely English articles that need to link to two (or more) Polish articles.

But it does work... If the English article on See Saw has "main subject: see saw", the English article on Swing has "main subject: swing", and the Polish article has "main subject: see saw, swing" or "main subject: pivoting playground device" (which see saw and swing are subclasses of), they should all link together.

I explain this in more-depth with an example of an article that combines topics on the Japanese Wikipedia here

Okay, I made a dedicated page describing exactly what I'm proposing: wikidata:User:Lectrician1/Sitelinks_2.0