| WMDE-leszek added a comment. |
Trying to take the step back and think on how the functionality in question has been implemented/outlined two years ago, here would be my thoughts:
- Having two not-necessarily same config flying around and parts of code arbitrarily picking one config, and other parts picking up the other seems like a bug/unfinished implementation to me. I am surprised it only surfaces now (it has been for 99% me who had messed that up), but should be fixed. If the current "broken" state actually makes commons work the fixing schedule can be of course postponed :)
- It looks to me that Commons and Wikidata federation is a bit of special case of the federation as it has been envisioned as a general concept. There is no need to have local and wikidata items (like most non-Wikimedia Wikibase instances request in the context in federation). "Funnily" enough, while the "typical" federation is nowhere in use due to current implementation's limitation, so the only real use case is this special/reverse one.
- I don't claim to have the thorough understanding of the Commons issues now, but it seems to me that those two kinds of federation, i.e. one intending to have different entity types in different repos, possibly having e.g. items from multiple repos, and the one where it is clear some entity types are coming from repo A, and some from repo B are actually separate things, they're not really overlapping. The former requires and is based on the concept of prefixes (to be able to distinguish between different sources of items), whereas the latter could actually do without having prefixes at all. Both make sense as separate approach (the former for non-Wikimedia Wikibases, the latter for Commons, for instance). I am not aware of any practical or planned instance where mixing both concept would actually be needed. Therefore I would strongly encourage to NOT mix both approaches in the implementation and to NOT create a super generic federation where all the things could be done using some config magic. The existing stuff is already overly complicated. Let's at least not make it worse.
Coming back to the particular Commons topic: from WMDE perspective option 3 is really something we would not like to see added as the feature etc. I do understand that converting millions of Commons pages to just change Qxyz to wd:Qxyz is going to be a costly migration. We're happy to help with coming up with some temporary/intermediate solution that would allow Commons running while the migration is on-going.
That said, I am wondering whether from Commons perspective using prefixes is something what's intended? Or actually the opposite? I am not aware (as in: I simply don't know) whether prefixing Wikidata items on Commons has ever been discussed in previous 2 years. Or has it been simply assumed "we need to add prefixes because this is what software requires"? Or did we in the first place implement the wrong feature few years ago?
Finally, I have to admit that being away from IRC for a while I don't feel like I am fully up-to-date with the status of federation between Commons and Wikidata. My assumption was the recent Daniel's change to beta commons config allowed to use beta wikidata items on Commons and all seems fine for now? Is this correct, or is it all still completely broken?
Regarding the most recent report above. @daniel could you please elaborate more what exactly does not work once you've verified whether it does or not? Having more information would make it easier for us (at least for me) to reason about the problem.
Cc: WMDE-leszek, Cparle, Jdforrester-WMF, Abit, EBjune, Ramsey-WMF, Aklapper, daniel, Nandana, JKSTNK, Lahi, PDrouin-WMF, Gq86, E1presidente, Anooprao, SandraF_WMF, GoranSMilovanovic, QZanden, Tramullas, Acer, LawExplorer, Silverfish, Poyekhali, _jensen, D3r1ck01, Susannaanas, Wong128hk, Jane023, Wikidata-bugs, Base, matthiasmullie, aude, El_Grafo, Dinoguy1000, Ricordisamoa, Wesalius, Lydia_Pintscher, Fabrice_Florin, Raymond, Steinsplitter, Mbch331
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