Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Categories/Avoiding broken category links

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Avoiding broken category links

  • Problem: There are thousands of broken links pointing from Wikipedias to Commons' category pages. Many of them are caused by the fact that someone who renames or deletes a category page on Commons is not aware of these interwiki links. Two examples:
en:1999 FIFA Confederations Cup → c:Category:Confederations Cup 1999
en:2,4-Dinitrotoluene → c:Category:Dinitrotoluene
  • Who would benefit: Users of all wm projects
  • Proposed solution: Either add a table globalcategorylinks to the Commons db similar to globalimagelinks or extend/replace the existing globalimagelinks so that at least the category namespace is covered as well.
  • More comments: In addition, the whole thing could then be handled easily and fast by scripts or bots. At this time one had to look up all of the projects for to detect a broken link what can take up to a few minutes per check and thus is not practicable.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • See also: Lists on en:wp and de:wp
  • Proposer: --Achim (talk) 20:45, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

@Achim55: Is this more or less the same as Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Bots and gadgets/category-redirect, or do I misunderstand / ignore some aspects? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

AKlapper (WMF), no, that's completely different as this deals only with interwiki links pointing to Commons. --Achim (talk) 22:36, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Achim55: This is something that is gradually being solved by Wikidata. When a commons category is moved, the commons sitelink on Wikidata updates (or if the category is deleted, the sitelink is removed). Ideally the templates on Wikipedias would display the link from Wikidata, so they would automatically update as well. The technical tools to do that exist, it's mostly just a community issue to do the migration. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 12:54, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Mike, if you've had a closer look to the given examples above, you might have noticed the two reasons why that doesn't work in practice: a) There are very many categories Wikidata doesn't know about nor their links, b) many of these links are set via {{commonscat}} tags on wp pages. These links are not connected to Wikidata. I've been told (I do not own a smartphone) that that's necessary because the links bar at the left is not shown in mobile view. Maybe some day these problems will be solved (or perhaps I'm missing something now), until then I'm going to keep up this request. Regards, --Achim (talk) 13:18, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Edit, forgot to mention: c) It's not always a 1:1 relation, for example does en:Altstadt (Zürich) contain 4 different links pointing to different categories on Commons. --Achim (talk) 14:23, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Achim55: As background info, I posted Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Multimedia and Commons/Improve support of interwiki links on Commons using Wikidata, and when it didn't get enough votes and nothing happened, I ended up doing most of the work for it myself, based around the creation and deployment of commons:Template:Wikidata Infobox. On (a), I've bot-added around a million commons sitelinks to Wikidata over the last year via Pi bot (talk · contribs) - and I'm always open to new suggestions of how to accurately add more sitelinks. On (b), I've just pinged you about a new sandbox version of the template on enwp that tries to solve that issue, and works for your first example. There isn't a commons category to link to for your second example, so the template should be removed from that article. On (c), that probably needs a new category creating on Commons that includes the four subcategories. The issue that the links bar isn't shown on mobile is not something that can be fixed on-wiki, so I'd suggest that the best way forward here is to submit a new wishlist request that focuses on solving that issue. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 22:34, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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