Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects/Clearer Wikidata Edit Summaries
Making Wikidata edits more visible in Wikipedia Watchlists and Recent Changes
[edit]What are Watchlists?
Wikipedia watchlists are personalized feeds where logged-in editors can track the changes (edits) made to specific pages they have chosen to monitor or "watch".
Why are Watchlists important?
They help editors stay informed about changes to articles they care about, allowing them to monitor edits and who is making them, catch mistakes, maintain quality, and ensure pages are protected from vandalism and incorrect information.
How does Wikidata factor into Wikipedia Watchlists?
Despite being a different project, edits made on Wikidata are relevant to Wikipedia for a number of reasons:
- Sitelinks: Wikidata stores links to Wikipedia articles and the pages of other Wikimedia Projects.
- Language links: A Wikipedia article in different languages is not a translation of one 'mother' article, they are entirely different articles. The links between these versions of an article are stored and handled by Wikidata.
- Transcluded Data: many articles pull facts directly from Wikidata and display them in place of manually-entered text. This can happen in the middle of a sentence in a paragraph, or an Infobox.
- Many charts, graphs and visualisations on Wikipedia use data that is stored on Wikidata.
- Authority control boxes and links to external databases: the unique identifiers and links are stored on Wikidata for easy retrieval.
In all of these ways, an edit made to a Wikidata item can change the content of a Wikipedia article, and should be reflected in the Watchlist. However, to view these Wikidata-origin edits, they must be enabled in the Wikipedia preferences. In other words, unless an editor actively enables this setting, they will not see edits from Wikidata appearing in their Watchlist.
Why we want to have edits of Wikidata origin enabled by default
If Wikipedia editors can see, understand, and act on changes to articles they are watching caused by Wikidata, it strengthens the connection between Wikipedia and Wikidata, improving article quality and collaboration across projects.
- Increase awareness & transparency: Ensure editors know when Wikidata changes impact their articles, preventing ugly surprises.
- Support accuracy & quality control: Allow editors to review and correct Wikidata-driven updates and learn how Wikidata can support article content (like automated lists).
- Encourage participation: Make Wikidata activity more visible to prompt editors to get involved and contribute.
- Improve the editor experience: Provide clearer, better-contextualized Wikidata updates without overwhelming editors, helping them stay informed without clutter.
How to see Wikidata edits in Watchlist and Recent Changes Wikidata edits in Watchlists and Recent Changes are an opt-in feature. For more information, see this guide to enabling Wikidata edits in your Recent Changes and Watchlist pages.
Please tell us what you think. It is important that this change does not interrupt user workflows, is intuitive and works well for understanding the changes that have been made to the articles you are watching.
To make sure of that, we need your feedback:
- Sign-up for our prototype testing
- Feedback for this task is gladly welcomed on the Discussion page.
Tasks, Investigations and Projects
[edit]| Project | On some wikis | On all wikis |
|---|---|---|
| Resolve Wikidata PID and QID into Labels
Wikidata edit summaries will show a label (Douglas Adams, Date of birth) instead of an ID (Q42, Property:P569) to make changes easier to understand |
Done
|
Done
|
| Prefetch Labels and Descriptions for resolved labels
Improve performance of loading Wikidata edits in Watchlist/Recent Changes list by batch prefetching and caching entity labels and descriptions to avoid numerous small database queries. |
Done
|
Done
|
| Investigate Multilingual Constraints of Improving Wikidata Edit Summaries on Wikipedia Watchlist Pages
To ensure the resolved labels remain understandable in language wikis with different scripting directions and establish a language fallback chain. |
Done
|
Done
|
| Scope which extensions/settings/bots affect how change logs are displayed
Investigate different ways bots, gadgets, user-scripts and settings interact with the QID/PID and newly-resolved Labels to understand how they will behave, and how to fix them if necessary. |
Done
|
Done
|
| Design proposal to add icons to Wikipedia Watchlist/Recent Changes edit summary (from Wikidata)
Introduce icons to visually indicate the type of edit in Watchlists, improving 'at a glance' clarity and context of edits that are sourced from Wikidata. Phab:T397256 |
In development
|
In development
|
Background and research
[edit]Suggestions for changes or improvements to Wikidata edit summaries inclusion in other Wikis are nothing new, with a Phabricator workboard - Wikidata Change Dispatching & Watchlists dedicated to collecting tasks on the topic.
In 2023 and 2024, we conducted research into the current State of Wikidata Usage across the Wikis through a combination of user interviews, documenting existing Wikidata integrations and searching through the myriad Phabricator tickets around the issue. We identified 3 main categories of using Wikidata in other Wikis:
- Linking pages - sitelinks, language and platform switching
- Embedding statements - Wikidata usage tracking, caching, updating and watchlist entries
- Edit support - tools, gadgets and 3rd-party applications that use Wikidata to support editor workflows
Research outcomes and findings These outcomes and more can be found in the State of Wikidata usage on other Wikis and Unlocking Wikidata research reports.
Challenges editors face when tracking Wikidata's data on Wikipedia (and other Wiki's)
- Information overload: many small or automated edits (such as label changes, adding a language sitelink or changing a statement) can quickly cause a cluttered Watchlist or Recent Changes list. This can create confusion, distracting from the changes editors want to monitor.
- Insufficient context for editors: editors often struggle to understand why a Wikidata edit is in their watchlist. Furthermore, interpreting the nature of the change and its implications to the current article prove elusive, even to experienced Wikimedians. This is further compounded due to the different edit history between the Version History (diff) and the Watchlist/Recent Changes list.
- Difficulty reacting: Wikipedia and Wikidata may share a syllable but they are vastly different projects, editors trying to react to a change on Wikidata negatively impacting their Wikipedia article face confusion navigating the very different interface, and then the data-model (how a Wikidata item is structured and organised). As a separate project, Wikidata has its own policies and permission rights that can trip a well-meaning editor up or prevent their changes from being accepted.
Recent changes and next steps
[edit]- Adoption of this as our 2025 focus area and begin investigations of the project scope and ticket refinement. Follow progress on the workboard.
- Send out announcements across selected wikis to let communities know about this upcoming feature, and have invited them to test and give feedback.
- Deploy labels of resolved Q/P-ID's to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Projects:
- Add visual icons to edit summaries to indicate the type of edit: see Icons page. In progress...
Lexicon / Glossary
[edit]- Watchlist: is a display list for tracking changes, similar to the Recent changes display, but limited to showing changes only across your set of "watched" pages.
- Recent Changes: A procedural feed of edits that are happening to Wikipedia pages.
- Related Changes: lists all the recent changes occurring on pages that are linked to a specified page.
- Edit Summary:
- Revision: an individual edit that has been made to the associated article.
- Page History: a.k.a Revision Hsitory. A full list of all changes/edits that have been made to the associated article.
- QID: Each Wikidata entity has an entity ID, which is a unique number prefixed by the letter Q
- Wikidata Item: Each Wikidata Item reresents a thing such as a topic, concept, object even person. A Wikidata item is unique, each having its own QID. Items are described by the Properties and values attributed to them which can be linked to other Items or entities. The data-model or ontology of attributes seeks to completely describe the item.
- PID: Each Wikidata property has an ID, which is a unique number prefixed by the letter P
- Wikidata Property: Properties have their own unique pages like Items, and they are also described by a series of attributes or other properties. Properties are paired with Values to form a Statement that describes an attribute of a Item or other Property.
- Wikidata Entity: Wikidata has different types of article pages, split into different entity types: Item, Property and Lexeme.