Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Wikidata/Creation of new objects resp. connecting to existing objects while avoiding duplicates

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Creation of new objects resp. connecting to existing objects while avoiding duplicates

• Problem: The problem of connecting newly created articles to existing objects respectivley creating new objects for unconnected pages (when, how, by whom, ...) for hundreds of newly created articles per day in different language versions, and how to avoid duplicates amongst the currently 96 million objects d:Special:Statistics, has been discussed for years again and again without a real solution, for example at d:Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot/RegularBot 2
• Proposed solution: At d:Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team/Archive/2020/09#Connecting newly created articles to existing objects resp. creating new object - additional step when creating articles, categories, etc. a possible solution has been discussed:

  An additional step after saving a newly created article etc. to present to the user a list of possible matching wikidata objects (e.g. a list of persons with the same name; could be a similar algorithm as the duplicate check / suggestion list in PetScan, duplicity example) or the option to create a new object if no one matches (depending one the type of the object, some values could be already be pre-filled and pulled from the article, e.g. from categories or infoboxes). From my point of view, one current problem is, that a lot of creators of articles, categories, navigational items, templates, disambiguations, lists, commonscats, etc. are either not aware of the existance of wikidata or did forget to connect a newly created article etc. to an already existing object or to create a new one if not yet existing, which might lead to (more) duplicates, if this creation respectivley connection is not done manually, but by a bot instead, which have to be merged manually afterwards.

  In addition, there could be specialized (depending on the type of the objects, e.g. one bot for humans, one for films, one for building, etc.) bots, which are for example able to check for various IDs (like GND, VIAF, LCCN, IMDb, ...) in order to avoid creating duplicates and creates new items or connects matching items based on IDs.

  Also, if someone uses the "translation function" to create a translated article in another language version, then the new translated article could be connected automatically to the object of the original article. And after a version import (after a translation), at the moment often the link to the Wikidata object gets lost and the article has to be reconnected again a second time manually.

• Who would benefit: Improved data quality, i.e. less duplicates
• More comments: Also see:
  • Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Wikidata/Creation of new objects resp. connecting to existing objects while avoiding duplicates
  • de:Wikipedia:Technische_Wünsche/Wunschparkplatz#Verbinden/Anlegen_von_bestehenden/neuen_Wikidata-Objekten_mit_neu_angelegten_Artikeln/Kategorien_unter_Vermeidung_von_Dubletten
• Phabricator tickets:
• Proposer: --M2k~dewiki (talk) 18:17, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

• For some new users they may pick a random item in suggestion in connect without looking at it carefully, which will result in errors more difficult to discover than duplicates.--GZWDer (talk) 14:48, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

  So the display should present sufficient information to disambiguate (description, instance of, country or location property..., image?). Maybe that's hard, but at the least, the suggested "translation" logic would make a lot of sense to implement. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:46, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

• Comment I'm not sure what differs between this proposal and the one "Autosuggest linking Wikidata item after creating an article"?? ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:49, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

  Indeed, they seem to ask for the same thing. Silver hr (talk) 20:20, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• There exists a gadget "[ ] moveClaim: A tool to move or copy a statement from one entity to another" that allows to duplicate a statement to another item, taking care not to create duplicate statements. Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) 16:43, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello @Geertivp: this proposal is about duplicate items/objects, not duplicate statements in one single item/object. For example, one item/object might be connected to the english article, while another item/object, describing the same entity (the same person, the same film the same book, the same geografical object, ...), is not connected to any article or project or to an article in different language(s). The proposed popup might look like this:

• https://wikidata-todo.toolforge.org/duplicity.php?wiki=dewiki&norand=1&page=Vasco%5FCordeiro

--M2k~dewiki (talk) 11:03, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Voting

•  Support — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 22:25, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support For new users it may not be easy to pick the correct / intended Wikidata item but otherwise it could become an "opt-in" functionality which is mostly used by people who regularly create articles. Simeon (talk) 21:09, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Douglasfugazi (talk) 21:21, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Thingofme (talk) 14:28, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support --Ciao • Bestoernesto • ✉ 16:51, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Ayumu Ozaki (talk) 04:05, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Hroptatyr (talk) 05:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)