Wikidata:Wikibooks
Shortcut: WD:WBShortcut: WD:WBWelcome to the Wikidata:Wikibooks portal for discussing integration of Wikibooks and Wikidata. This portal homepage serves as a beginner-friendly overview of Wikidata for the Wikibooks community.
Wikidata is a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It does for data what Wikimedia Commons does for media files: it centralizes access to and management of structured data for the various projects that are part of the Wikimedia Foundation family. This means that similar content in different languages, mappings and links between sites, and other elements that are useful to multiple projects only need to be recorded and maintained once, rather than in each of the hundreds of projects.
Structured data also means that content can be organized and stored in a defined way, often in order to encode meaning and preserve relationships between different items. It allows machines to 'read', understand, and process information and, in doing so, opens up a lot of exciting ways for data to be used and re-used!
Wikidata will provide structure for all the knowledge stored in its sister projects including Wikibooks.
Instead of pages (the main type of content for most wikis), Wikidata is made up ofitems. Items are used to represent all the things in human knowledge, including topics, concepts, and objects. For example, the1988 Summer Olympics,love,Elvis Presley, andgorilla are all items in Wikidata. Each item also has a unique identifier (starting with a Q prefix) and its own page in the Wikidata main namespace. For example, for the items listed above,1988 Summer Olympics(Q8470),love(Q316),Elvis Presley(Q303) andGorilla(Q36611) are the respective item pages. These pages are where all the data for each item is added, edited, and maintained, including links to other Wikimedia project sites (these are known as sitelinks or interwiki links).
Each page has four sections:
This means that when it comes to capturing and collecting Wikibooks data, each Wikijunior, for example, can be linked to an item on Wikidata, which in turn would then link out to every page for, corresponding to, or about that Wikijunior on any other Wikimedia project via sitelinks; the item page would also list datastatements with facts related to the Wikijunior (like "date of birth", "native language", etc.). For example, one such Wikijunior item page could beWikijunior:The Elements(Q19367214).
Similar to items, statementproperties are referenced with unique identifiers starting with a P (instead of a Q); for example, "date of birth" would be represented bydate of birth(P569).
Wikidata already holds data in many languages that can be re-used on multiple sister projects, and new data is constantly being added. Wikidata also enables content in sister projects to be enriched with additional facts and information (stored as data statements on item pages).
The choice to use this data is left entirely to the Wikibooks community—future changes to the wiki software will only provide anoption to retrieve information from Wikidata if desired.
Wikidata also offers sister projects the ability to manage sitelinks (aka as interwiki links) in one, centralized place. For all sister projects, sitelinks serve as a replacement for a previous system of interlanguage links that was used to link from a page in one language on Wikibooks to an equivalent page in another language, for example theEnglish Wikibooks page onGerman to theRussian Wikibooks pageНемецкий язык. These interlanguage links used to be stored locally on each Wikibooks page in the wikitext and maintained separately in each language so that if the name of a page changed or was moved, then pages in each language would need to have their links updated to reflect the changes. Sitelinks thereby improve upon this system by having everything stored and managed in Wikidata from an item page, in this caseGerman(Q188).
It is still possible, however, to keep the links in the wikitext and completely suppress all Wikidata links by using the magicword{{noexternallanglinks}} if desired. The magic word also supports suppression of only specific languages, in the form of{{noexternallanglinks:es|fr|it}} which would suppress only the Spanish, French, and Italian links.