Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects/Show Wikidata edits
Aim:
We aim to improve the transparency of Wikidata edits in client wikis by making Wikidata-driven changes visible for editors, patrollers and reviewers.
Background context:
Each month, approximately 160 million Wikidata entities are used in Wikipedia and other wikimedia projects.
These entities include:
- Interlanguage links (important for switching languages or accessing information about the article in other projects
- Recent changes and watchlist notifications (mainly used to monitor article health and fight vandalism)
- Article status indicators
- Templates that use Wikidata, such as...
- Infoboxes content (for snap-views of the article content)
- Authority control values (confirming external identifiers)
- Inserting wikidata entities (e.g. the population of a city) into articles through templates (e.g. parser functions and Lua modules).
Despite the wide-ranging use of Wikidata in other Wikimedia projects (*insert some stats about what % of articles use Wikidata's data for their content*), editors find it hard to know which parts of their articles come from Wikidata leading them to miss out on vital changes affecting the work they care most about.
Our view is that:
Changes that affect article content should be visible to editors in the same places and workflows, regardless of whether they originate locally or via Wikidata.
If a Wikidata-driven update alters the content of an article or the way it connects to other content in the Wikimedia projects, it should:
- appear in Recent Changes
- appear on watchlists
- be attributable, understandable, and reviewable like any other edit
Many editors rely on Wikidata's data to help keep the content they care about in shape and we want to expose and extend this integral part of the editing workflow to as many editors as would like it. But this remains an optional change, it can be at any-time disabled.
How To: disable Wikidata edits from your Preferences
[edit]Edits from Wikidata are now automatically displayed in a Wikipedia Watchlist / Recent Changes, to hide them, they first need to be disabled in your Preferences settings. You can do this for both Watchlists and Recent Changes pages.
This example (and links) is setup for a Wikipedia account, but the process can be replicated for any Wikimedia project and language.
- Login to your Wiki account.
- Open your
Preferences menu from the Personal Settings 
dropdown (or click these links:
Special:Preferences (Watchlist) or
Special:Preferences (Recent changes)). - Under the header Advanced options, click the checkbox for the 4th option:
- Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist
For more information about Watchlist settings, see MediaWiki:Help:Preferences.
How to: disable Wikidata edits from the Recent Changes page
[edit](The process is the same from your Watchlist page)
The example below is from the English Wikipedia, but the steps can be replicated for any language version of any Wikimedia project.
1. Navigate to the Recent Changes page of your desired Wiki and click on the hamburger icon (
) or in the empty search field of the Active filter menu.
2. Scroll down to the Type of change section where the option Show Wikidata edits is located, and untick the checkbox.
3. Wikidata edits have now been hidden from your Recent Changes page. All Wikidata edits are denoted by a D (and an m as they also count as minor edits).
You can easily enable and view them again them again by clicking the x in the Active filters topbar.
Showing edits and changelog entries from Wikidata Items connected to other Wikis is an opt-in setting, they have to be enabled first to be displayed in the Recent Changes and/or Watchlist pages.
How To: enable Wikidata edits from your Preferences
[edit]Edits from Wikidata are not automatically displayed in a Wikipedia Watchlist / Recent Changes, they first need to be enabled in your Preferences settings. You can do this for both Watchlists and Recent Changes pages.
This example (and links) is setup for a Wikipedia account, but the process can be replicated for any Wikimedia project and language.
- Login to your Wiki account.
- Open your Preferences menu from the Personal Settings dropdown (or click these links:
Special:Preferences (Watchlist) or
Special:Preferences (Recent changes)). - Under the header Advanced options, click the checkbox for the 4th option:
- Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist
For more information about Watchlist settings, see MediaWiki:Help:Preferences.
How To: enable Wikidata edits in the Recent Changes page
[edit](The process is the same from your Watchlist page)
The example below is from the English Wikipedia, but the steps can be replicated for any language version of any Wikimedia project.
1. Navigate to the Recent Changes page of your desired Wiki and click on the hamburger icon () or in the empty search field of the Active filter menu.
2. Scroll down to the Type of change section where the option Show Wikidata edits is located, and tick the checkbox.
3. Wikidata edits are now enabled in your Recent Changes page. All Wikidata edits are denoted by a D (and an m as they also count as minor edits).
You can easily remove them again by clicking the x in the Active filters topbar.
4. If you'd like Wikidata edits to stand out more, utilise the Highlight results feature from the Active filters menu to apply a colour to Wikidata edits.
5. Wikidata edits will now be more visible with a highlight colour applied. (Please note it is possible to have the same colour applied to more than one filter)
Showing edits and changelog entries from Wikidata Items connected to other Wikis is now an opt-out setting for your Wiki. Follow this guide to hide them from your wikis Recent Changes and/or Watchlist pages.
Please note: Wikidata edits are still occurring, this setting will just change your ability to be notified about them happening.