Template talk:WD version

Linked authors on translations pages

For versions and translations pages, can we remove the author? They're already included in the header, so adding a link to them in each entry seems unnecessary and distracting. Might be worth having two separate templates for pages where the author will vary (e.g. portals, disambiguation pages) and ones where they won't (author pages, version pages, translations pages). --Yodin^T 14:40, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

• Apologies; I've just seen {{WD author}}: surely that template should be used on version pages, translations pages, etc.? --Yodin^T 14:42, 15 April 2022 (UTC)

Template brokenness

The logic used by this family of templates is incomplete, which is the source of brokenness here, when the 'normal' method of connecting Wikidata entities to Commons categories is used.

From c:Commons:Wikidata infobox help, specifically the FAQ:

5 How does {{Wikidata Infobox}} decide what Wikidata item corresponds to a Commons category?

• There are two ways this can happen:

1. The Commons category is sitelinked directly from a Wikidata item that is an instance of Wikimedia category (Q4167836) and there is a category's main topic (P301) statement for that Wikidata item. The infobox is generated from that main topic page.
2. The Commons category is sitelinked from a Wikidata item that is not an instance of Wikimedia category (Q4167836).

That is how this has worked, and been documented, for years now, and to work correctly with other wikis, including Commons, your templates should work the same way. From a quick glance, it looks like the code that the particular template uses to do it is in c:Module:Wikidata Infobox, starting around line 90. The first method is what is incredibly widely used on all Wikipedias to deal with articles, lists, and categories that refer to the same 'Wikidata concept' across namespaces.

To insist that book work/edition/exemplar items on Wikidata only use the second method in order to work with a recent set of templates here, despite that Wikidata and Commons had documented the first as the "main" method and used it widely for years before these templates were written, is not ok. Instead, the templates need to be fixed here, to work the same way every other wiki works, or just deal with that they are broken by a widespread method of doing this.

Please do not start edit wars on Wikidata instead of making these work correctly. This is a problem here, with these templates, that needs to be fixed here. Jarnsax (talk) 22:27, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

With regards to "start edit wars on Wikidata" I presume you are talking about RaboKarbakian's "unusual" (i.e. wrong :-) ) views about categories and versions? I tried to understand either side of that argument, and failed. But in any case, I'm fully in favor of making these templates consistent with the prevailing way things are linked -- but I don't understand what change that would be. Could you clarify? JesseW (talk) 01:00, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm here only because this is the only link that he gave me, he wrote it, and so I'm kinda trying to say what would cause the problem he's griping about, without him (still) showing me a page that is, or was, broken by what I did so I can figure out what the problem is. I'm somewhat guessing based on what he complained about, and it's quite possible that he's just linking mangled items in the wrong template fields or something, but had figured out a way to 'make it work' as long as stuff was broken his particular way. I still don't know for sure, and am pretty annoyed with the guy.

Templates that need info about the subject of a category (on Commons or wherever) shouldn't assume the category is "linked" (the wikidata link in the left menu) to an entity that has the information needed... it might be linked to a "wikimedia category" item instead, and if so it needs to follow the "category's main topic" to get to the right place. I'm gathering that something about how this template works makes that (often wrong) assumption, and gives weird crap when it's not true.

Incidentally, Wikimedia list article (Q13406463) works the same way.... I suspect a lot of the "use cases" for these templates (lists of editions of a work) should actually be linked to the work item that way, which would make the whole thing a lot easier (if the template understood both list and cat entities). Jarnsax (talk) 02:11, 25 September 2022 (UTC)