Talk:Community Wishlist/W358

Update on Your Wishlist Request: Dynamic Wikidata References

Hello @Aerrapc,

We appreciate you submitting this wishlist!

Currently we're exploring this internally to determine its feasibility and potential next steps. We’ll share any updates as discussions progress. In the meantime, feel free to share any further thoughts or examples that could help refine this idea.

--ARamadan-WMF (talk) 17:31, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello again,

Thank you for your suggestion on dynamic references in Wikidata.

This idea has come up before and is appreciated as a thoughtful proposal. However, implementing it would require major changes to the Wikidata data model and underlying software, which makes it quite complex and unlikely to be pursued in the near term. That said, there are some other approaches being explored to make referencing easier, though nothing concrete is planned at this time.

--ARamadan-WMF (talk) 14:47, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

Reference as an item

@Aerrapc: not sure if this is exactly what you meant, but any reference can be a WD item. I used this to add "stated in" references for several statements (area, population, postal code) for 7000 settlements such as Brnaze (Q3304444). So if anything in the reference ever changes (URL for example), one needs to fix one item instead of 7000. This also works with en:Template:Cite Q, as you can see on enwiki for the above-mentioned settlement. pon_or (talk) 01:44, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, but my issue is mainly with things that don't get their own Wikidata QiDs, such as an organisations' website. Setting a reference as "stated in Q22137024" returns an error message. Aerrapc (talk) 21:07, 6 July 2025 (UTC)