Talk:Wikidata/Technical proposal

Format to store/retrieve data

I have a little question about data formating for this project. In es.wikipedia we use the format dd/mm/yyyy to represent a date (or dd de mmmm de yyyy) but there's a lot of standard ways to represent a date. How can we store this data? (yes, I consider the ISO standard to store), but a new question appears: how can we use (or reuse) the standard data in local projects?. Consider that the birthday of someone is a date datatype, but the representation depends on locale (es, en, es_AR, tv, etc.). Are we considering a bot (o similar tool) to make the transformation? Superzerocool (talk) 14:22, 2 April 2012 (UTC) (I use the date datatype to give us some example, please consider other data such as numbers or name of US States)

There will be ways to convert data and show it appropriately. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:36, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Woud you mind paraphrasing this sentence for me?

In P2.7 for Phase 2:

...This must consider the issues of protection and protection propagation from the Wikipedias (see also O2.5).

Woud you mind paraphrasing this sentence for me? Thanks. --Linforest (talk) 06:45, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Sure :) This is about protection of pages. Like say a page on the English Wikipedia is protected. We have to think about how this is relevant for Wikidata because worst case the article is protected and the data in it still change constantly because someone is having an edit war in Wikidata.

Thanks so much for working on the translations! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:06, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Lydia, many thanks for your timely clarifying and encouraging! Cheers:) --Linforest (talk) 17:28, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

Stylistic considerations: bringing in the multilingual communities early?

May I say that this attention to technical planning is the kind of professionalism we've been waiting for in the Wikimedia movement. It's very good work.

Style is so important in the presentation of data, and it varies from language to language, and even within languages. Many Wikimedia projects—particularly the Wikipedias—have editors with expertise in such considerations for their language (some even specialise in numerical style, although I don't). I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to invite them to give input (including negotiating among themselves in a multilingual environment) concerning presentation and formatting on Wikidata, before too much is set in cement.

The proposal for Phase 2 states: "Some data types that are basic but do not fit into linear transformations (like time, space, temperature, and currency) must be appropriately implemented." This is not just a matter of ascertaining basic practices concerning decimal points (0,27 vs 0.27), commas/dots/spaces in long numbers (1 020 600 vs 1.020.000 vs 1,020,000), and whether percentage signs are spaced (as in French) or unspaced (as in English). Do we need a shared understanding about levels of precision? Should the ISO be followed in terms of the leading zero? What is to be done about the matter of US versus SI units? (That was worked through with some difficulty on en.WP, and now functions well enough, but not without a set of rules for managing what is in effect a binary system in the anglosphere.) Same for date formats. Many of these issues could be the subject of regular bot-runs. Tony (talk) 08:17, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes this sounds like something we should talk about. Do you have time for a quick chat on IRC to get this started? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:04, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

This interests me, too. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 17:59, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Fully internationalized and partly localized

The interlanguage links section says:

"Note that the user interfaces will all be fully internationalized and partly localized"

Why only partly localized? translatewiki gives the necessary tools for full localization. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:02, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Ah of course it's possible to localize it all. However we didn't want to promise this in the initial proposal because we don't know if volunteers will actually do _all_ of it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:43, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Interlanguage links magic word

The description of phase 1 here mentions a magic word several times. I remember that the Interlanguage extension used such a magic word. I don't see such magic word at the Helium article in the demo system.

Is this magic word still relevant? If not, it should be clarified. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 11:06, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikidata uses a magic word, yes, but unlike the Interlanguage extension, it allows users to exclude pages from picking up interwiki links from Wikidata. Details can be found at mw:Extension:Wikibase_Client.--Snaevar (talk) 20:37, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Italian translation

If somebody wants to help out translating this page in Italian, I have started here. Thank you -- CristianCantoro (talk) 11:59, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Why on another wiki rather than here with Translate? --Nemo 14:04, 27 September 2013 (UTC)