On 5 April 2013 21:41, Michael Hale <hale.michael...@live.com> wrote:
> Well, I could make a view that shows the diff of a Wikipedia article stacked
> on top of the diff for the corresponding Wikidata item on my computer in a
> few minutes. But diffs can be very long sometimes, so there would be a lot
> of discussion about whether that view is more appropriate than just making
> it easier to find the link to the Wikidata item on the diff and edit pages
> for articles that include Wikidata properties. But the work-around you
> suggest is not a work-around. If the U.S. article currently says: "The
> population of the U.S. is 309,000,000 people." And I change it to say "The
> population of the U.S. is {{#property:population|current-value=309000000}}
> people." Which scenarios does that improve?It makes changes visible in the present wikitext diff and allows to render the past version easily to a correct value. It is not meant as a perfect solution to all, but as an option for an editing community to enable them to chose between keeping the information visible and traceable in the Wikidata diff. I agree about the disadvantages of "clutter", but the point is that is does allow a community to choose that they don't like clutter and don't need the history and diffs, and simple create the property functions inside the templates (with no tracking). This would indeed show the changes in the present diff and it would allow several years into the future to reasonably understand (in wikitext) and render (as html) previous states of wikipedia articles several years into the past. However, better solutions are certainly possible. Based on what you write I can imagine an editing workflow diff similar to the stacking of diffs, but actually reduced to a link pointing to Wikidata. The features I view as important are: 1. In the history, Wikidata changes for a topic are made visiable durign the the display of Wikipedia-Wikitext changes. Ideally multiple Wikidata edits could be merged into a single line if no Wikitext changes occur in between. There could be options to hide Wikidata changes. The "how" is not so important, but I think the present watchlist implementation is insufficient, because it generates an "attention" message, but makes it hard to follow up (which usually occurs in the page history + diff). 2. In the actual diff, instead of stacking the Wikitext + Wikidata property diffs, I could imagine that a solution that at the bottom says: "Associated Wikidata properties changed in the choosen period." Where choosen period is the period chosen for the diff by the editor and where the whole is linked to a Wikidata diff. Present Wikipedia communication practice heavily relies on pointing to specific history diffs (through links), but currently Wikidata changes are completely invisible there. By automatically "linking them in" present practice could continue smoothly and non-disruptive. 3. Ideally, the Wikidata diff link should have option to hide the "Wikidata internal" properties like changes in item labels, and should show language specific changes only for a specific language, to keep the attention of content editors focussed on the relevant changes (most likely Wikidata will still show more properties than those used on the wikipedia page, but this could be acceptable). ---- The question of rendering the html for past versions is separate. You seem to say that it is already easy to write the #property: function such that it takes into account the edit timestamp of a wikipedia page version and evaluates the property as it was at that point in time (with the current version (ie. when called without a pageid) always evaluating to now(), not the last editing timestamp. ASIDE: I don't worry too much if a property is being referenced by name or ID in a past version and has since been deleted, the resulting error message is transparent rather than misleading (which the display of "wrong" information is). Gregor _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
