Help talk:FAQ

Merge with Meta:Wikidata/FAQ

I think it should be merged with Meta:Wikidata/FAQ, but the types of questions are somewhat different. -Zolo (talk) 08:16, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

 Support. --Stryn (talk) 08:23, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

 Oppose but Meta:Wikidata/FAQ is about general aspects of Wikidata. Instead, this page should treat the practical aspects of Wikidata. Raoli (talk) 11:38, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

 Oppose. This is a practical page. The meta is a technical page. Ypnypn (talk) 05:14, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/Lighthouse doesn't work

The link d:Special:ItemByTitle/enwiki/Lighthouse provided as an example in the last question, just doesn't work - at least, it didn't work when I clicked it in the FAQ page. I got a "No such special page" error.--Pere prlpz (talk) 11:57, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Fixed, there was ItemByName, when special page is called ItemByTitle. --Stryn (talk) 12:03, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

change answer to first question

Hey :)

Can someone please fix the answer to the first question. It leads to a completely different FAQ. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:52, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Make this translatable

Please make this page translatable by Translate extension. It would help other language versions be kept up to date. --fryed-peach (talk) 13:01, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Question 16

"I've got two items that refer to the same encyclopedia articles, that is, an "interwiki conflict". Where can I report this?" Two WD items cannot contain links to the same articles, it's one of the basic principles. So, what is meant here? --Michgrig (talk) 07:26, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Not the same articles in the same Wikipedia, but to the same articles in different Wikipedias. Btw sometimes there is also exactly same kind of contents, see Bugzilla:46119. --Stryn (talk) 07:35, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Having duplicated items with articles about the same thing but in different languages (item Qx with articles in Lang1, Lang2, Lang3 and item Qy with articles in Lang4 and Lang5) is the easiest kind of conflict. Such items are easily merged and nominated for deletion, and it takes 10 minutes maximum. But much more (and much more difficult) conflicts are when there is one combined article in one language and two separate articles in another, or two articles in one language and three articles in another, etc. I'd suggest that this Question should be reworded but frankly speaking I don't know how to say it better. --Michgrig (talk) 08:33, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Where to report bugs?

I only found meta:Wikidata/Development/Howto Bugreport but to be honest it's a bit complicated for me to use Bugzilla so I report a bug here:

At the item Q7018012 I want to add the Romanian corresponding page (w:ro:Categorie:Americani executați) and it doesn't allow me to choose Romanian language.

Also Check the w:Category:Executed American people - the "Edit links" link is not available. In order to get to Q7018012 I had to go first at w:es:Categoría:Ejecutados en Estados Unidos. —  Ark25  (talk) 08:33, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi. If you don't want to use Bugzilla, WD:Contact the development team is probably a batter place to report bugs than here. However, the ones you are reporting here are no bugs bur rather interwiki conflicts (so some sort of error, yes, but not a technical one) - if they are too complex to solve on your own, there's a special report page for them here: WD:Interwiki conflicts. You cannot add another Romanian Wikipedia link to Q7018012 as there already is ro:Categorie:Persoane executate în Statele Unite linked. And in en:Category:Executed American people you won't find an "Edit links" link because this page itself is not assigned to any Wikidata item (but has some local interwiki links). Seems to me by a quick look that there are two kinds of slightly different categories: One about "People executed by the United States", one about "Executed American people". May well be that those are mixed up in several languages. Maybe a new (or several new) item has to be created, some links have to be moved, or even some duplicate category pages have to be merged on some Wikipedias. --YMS (talk) 08:59, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

You are right. I created the new item, for executed Americans - Q15920164. I didn't know that adding local interwiki links will wipe the "Add links" - like the one at w:Category:Former counties of Texas. So, in the future, if I will get confused by some tangled interwiki links, I will report to WD:Interwiki conflicts. Thanks! —  Ark25  (talk) 11:00, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

How to detect pages that don't have correspondents in other languages?

Hello again, I would like to detect all articles on Romanian Wikipedia that don't have interwikis. Like for example w:ro:Victor Mocanu. How can I do that? Or can anyone generate such a list? Thanks. —  Ark25  (talk) 02:18, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

@Ark25: Try w:ro:special:unconnectedpages and also Bene's lonely items list. (Loads for a longer time.) Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:01, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. It looks like it's missing a lot of pages. For example I can't find ro:Jo Yeon Woo in the list. Why is that? —  Ark25  (talk) 01:30, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

You need to input 'offset' to get next pages. That link is only to first five thousand pages. If you click more times on 'next', you will get to the page where one item is Q12731377. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 01:50, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that I tried the first list. I did what you say: [1]. Still, the article is not in the list. —  Ark25  (talk) 02:39, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

The first list is for articles that are not connected with WD. The second one is for articles that are connected but their items has no other links. Since the page you mentioned is connected, you can't find it in the first but in the second list. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 02:43, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

I see, thanks for your patience to explain all that! —  Ark25  (talk) 02:46, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Another question: ro:Zamfir Dumitrescu appears in the first list, with 1 interwiki link in the article. But the interwiki link was deleted in march 2013. And the interwiki link is on WikiData since december 2012. Why it's in the list then? —  Ark25  (talk) 03:38, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Same thing with ro:2006 în astronomie, ro:Abioseston —  Ark25  (talk) 05:19, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

This is a (probably known) bug. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:11, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Null edits help, some of those page are no longer on the list. Btw, rowiki should firstly rid of old interwiki links and then merge duplicate items. In cswiki, we have already done the first phase and are doing the second now. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:27, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for late answer. And thanks. On rowiki nobody (AFAIK) picked up those tasks yet. I just connected w:ro:Categorie:Laureați ai Premiului Nobel pentru Pace, it had no entry and it wasn't in the list. Maybe some articles are missing in those lists, I don't know. —  Ark25  (talk) 23:08, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

New editor removing sitelink

I just found two examples of vandalisms that fall into new editor removing sitelink category - 4 and 8 moths old. I wonder if there is any statistic or approximation about how many of them go undetected. —  Ark25  (talk) 02:46, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

List of values is complete.

I have a question about integration with Wikimedia Commons. Within the Commons, we can use wikidata to add an "In Wikipedia" section to the left side of the page for a subject. To do so for Abraham Lincoln (Q91) (for example), there is a section on the Q91 page called "Wikimedia Commons page linked to this item", which allows me to add an entry for only one of the following:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abraham_Lincoln
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

My question: is there a way to add both of the above to Q91? If so, how? Thanks. 72.244.200.36 13:23, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

This whole system is incomprehensible

Boy, what would I give for getting back the way of setting/correcting interwiki links IN articles in the old Wikipedia days! This new interwiki (dis)organization has cost me so many nerves and hours of extra work, that I'd better not think about it. That the whole system definitely makes no sense, I can prove with the following example: Take w:Verbal noun. The German interwiki link "Verbalsubstantiv" is WRONG. It must be de:Verbalnomen which is not the same. I like swimming. German (literally!) Ich mag das Schwimmen. A "Verbalsubstantiv" instead would be "der Schwimmer" (the swimmer; derived from the verb). OK, so I tried to change the link, and I got a conflict. But why, damnit? This is in fact no conflict. Q2513510 is the German wikidata entry, which has only the German article linked and nothing else. And I can't delete that. And hence it has nothing to do with English Wikipedia. And hence I should be able to change the link for German Wikipedia into the correct one in Q1350145. But it does not work! I just can't believe that due to these 234387 conflicts in future, I will now always need someone else to change an interwiki link which is just blatantly wrong! See, if Q2513510 did belong to English WP and if there was a "twin article" linking to the correct "Verbalnomen" article, I would understand why there is a conflict indicated. But Q2513510 is *completely* *independent* from English Wikipedia. Visibly. And hence there should be NO conflict. I'm tempted to file a bug. Simply because this can't go on like this. I've been working on WP for far over a decade, but I've never experienced anything as annoying and time-wasting as this. Sorry for the long rant. -andy 2.242.238.102 01:01, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

Detecting pages that contain interwiki links

There are many pages that are interconnected using WikiData but they also contain interwiki links. How can I make a list with all of them? For example ro:Dietă (dezambiguizare) contains it:Dieta. —  Ark25  (talk) 14:28, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Some bots, reports and tools used to give you some overview about this, but I fail to find anything that's still alive. What is there on any Wikimedia wiki, is Special:UnconnectedPages. It originally gives you a list of articles not connected to any Wikidata item, but you can filter it so it only shows you those that do have local interwiki links instead. However, in no configuration it does include any articles that have local interwiki links but are connected to Wikidata nonetheless (and it usually contains a lot of outdated entries, too). --YMS (talk) 15:13, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Transforming articles into redirects

What happens with the redirects?

I just transformed a wikipedia page into a redirect at ro:Lista de localități din raionul Șoldănești, redirecting to ro:Listă de localități din raionul Șoldănești. The item Q4435271 is linked to the first page, which is now a redirect page. Is there any robot that make the corresponding change in Wikidata (linking the item to the second page), or I have to do it manually? —  Ark25  (talk) 02:57, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Help:FAQ#Editing confusing

How do I add a sitelink to an item for a section within a larger page [...] It is, however, possible to maintain sitelinks for anchors outside of Wikidata and locally on Wikimedia sites using inline links. How should inline links work for sitelinks?--Diwas (talk) 21:30, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

"allows only one sitelink per item per language"

This is currently contested at phab:T54971, specifically members are investigating how introducing a configuration setting to break up this limit is possible. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 08:54, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Vandal-fighting resources needed

Wikidata needs vandal-fighting templates, tools, and guidance, just as Wikipedia does. This anonymous editor, for example, has made some unconstructive edits, but Wikidata provides no guidance, tools, or templates with which to address that, aside from leaving a message on their talk page. This is not scalable. Zazpot (talk) 05:08, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Workaround for sitelink to an item for a section within a larger page and make two pages in language A link to one page in language B

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T54564

There is a task to fix that (phab:T54564), but in the mean time here is a workaround:

• Replace a redirection to the page with some text like "Workaround for T54564"
• Add the redirection as a link in Wikidata like you would do with a normal article
• Restore the redirection

The RedBurn (ϕ) 10:49, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Do I get notified if an edit occurs to a watchlisted page? Preferences? I never look at my Wikidata watchlist

I only have 3 items on my watchlist currently. But I never check this Wikidata watchlist.

But I want to be notified of any edits to those 3 items. I can not tell from my preferences if I will get notified in any way if any of those items are edited. Do I get notified if an edit occurs to a watchlisted page? --Timeshifter (talk) 09:05, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

This feature is in preparation. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:18, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Web notifications of edits to items on my watchlist would be great too. I just noticed that I can be notified by email. I didn't see it the first time I checked all the preferences. It is at the bottom of Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal.

I was web notified of your ping in the edit summary of your reply here. That's good. Talk page notifications speed up discussions.

--Timeshifter (talk) 19:22, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

How do I request to add a language link to a locked page?

I want to add the Māori Wikipedia page Niukāhera to the page Newcastle, New South Wales but it’s locked. Can someone help? I also want to add the Tongan page (Nikasolo) and the Nauruan page (Newcastle) to the same item.

How crazy should we go with aliases?

I've removed clutter from the aliases of a few items, or at least what seemed like clutter to me, only to be reverted. For example, one of the aliases at Earth (Q2) was "🗺". Is it reasonable to have something like that? No-one's likely to use that as a search term for "planet Earth". Should we have every character, emoji and phrase that's ever been identified with the Earth, or are aliases intended to be a more limited set of likely search terms? E.g., Earth's been poetically called the "blue marble", but that's also the title of a specific photo of the Earth. Someone looking up "blue marble" is likely looking for the photo. Should it be an alias for Q2 anyway? Should we include rare terms like "Sol III" that might be opaque to people, as a kind of index? I see that the poop emoji 💩 is an alias for feces (Q496), but only for English. If we include emojis, shouldn't they be repeated for every language? Kwamikagami (talk) 05:54, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Unlink wrong category

Wikidata item Q60786924 ("Naturschutzgebiet Haspelmoor") was linked to a wrong Commons category ("Category:Hörnauer Wald" which is not related in any way). I already removed the wrong statement from Wikidata, but the category infobox still shows the wrong item.

How to fix this? Remove the infobox completely? Create and link the correct item in Wikidata? Plozessor (talk) 13:16, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

@Plozessor: I can't see the infobox connected anymore. It probably took some time to propagate changes from Wikidata to Commons. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:04, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

I still see it. Might be caching issue though.

https://www.amazon.de/clouddrive/share/z3BLZToKTE0iPzQA5lmMNhnXthNtp7PdvgFH314L043

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:H%C3%B6rnauer_Wald Plozessor (talk) 18:52, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Gadgets for purging

Since Help:FAQ#Purge is the target of Help:Purge, I think it would be useful to provide a link towards the gadgets for purging a page. Horcrux (talk) 19:15, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Other sites -> Multilingual sites

I think the section on Wikidata is called Multilingual sites now. Kjoonlee (talk) 17:25, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, there's been a local override since 2021. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:13, 26 April 2026 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to add references to Wikidata statements?

I tried to add a source for e.g. the cause of death (P509) of Elie Abel (Q5360695), using URL "https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10521-2004Jul23.html" which is his obituary in a very notable newspaper. Why does this require learning rocket science??? Why are there no simple tools for this?

When I tried clicking "+ add reference" on the statement, it inserts an empty box labeled "Property" with three possible values in a menu ("reference URL", "retrieved" or "stated in"). Each of these has half a line of brief instructions in the menu but the instructions are cut off with "..." and seemingly unreachable by any UI action. Clicking on one of them, e.g. "reference URL" which says "should be used for Internet URLs as references. Use 'Wikimedia import URL'..." and then the instructions run out. I don't see any 'Wikimedia import URL' anywhere in the user interface, so why does it even bother telling me about it? I tried a search for that and got nowhere. I can't read the rest of the instructions in the menu; if I click on the "..." it just picks the menu item for "Reference URL". Even if I pick Reference URL as the Property, then it gives me a second incomprehensible UI, with 3 tiny boxes stacked vertically on the line, plus two trash-can delete icons. There is no place to put a URL. And no instructions on what to do next. What???!

So I backed out and dug up "Help:Sources" from the home page of Wikidata Help. But "Help:Sources" was completely ridiculous, giving whole paragraphs of irrelevant info first (like whether a source is primary, secondary or tertiary), and a 9-step process for even *deciding* what kind of reference to add (a book, a web page, or a headstone for bog's sake). Then for a simple one like the URL of a newspaper article, it provides another recursive 50-step process for "adding or finding a 'publication item' for the newspaper itself", "adding or finding an item for the article", and then manually building by hand a huge conceptual structure with very particular parameters in very particular places. It uses terms like "the source" without defining them (is the Washington Post the source? The Washington Post on July 24, 2003 the source? Page 37 of that issue of the Post? Is the obituary text itself the source? Help:Sources never says. The part of it that deals with newspapers seems mostly to be focused on academic journals!) Most of this deep conceptual construction seemingly can't happen on the same page as the actual statement that I am trying and crying to provide a simple URL source for. Do I have to pop up three or four extra tabs in my web browser and then copy stuff back and forth between them, while ignoring the Elie Abel page that I'm trying to add a source to? Somewhere in there, I sincerely believe, there is probably somewhere that this useful URL could be entered, but I never even got close to that point.

No wonder so few statements in Wikidata actually have their sources documented!

Is there any tool for making this *simple*, like adding a in Wikipedia? Yes, I know adding citations to Wikipedia isn't simple, it has many sub-parts, but at least there is a page that tells you how to do it, with examples. And there is actual documentation for e.g. "cite news" parameters and when to use them. And you can get to the documentation with a couple of clicks by merely entering a bad parameter and previewing the page. And if you're a total novice, you can just enter something wrongly formatted and save it and be done. So there are thousands and thousands of editors who know how to do it, or who are able to take a partial citation entered by a novice, and turn it into a full citation. There must be only seven or eight people who actually understand how to add such a simple reference to Wikidata, given the poor quality of the documentation and the convoluted nature of the database.

(Yes, I realize that besides the URL of a newspaper article there is also metadata about it like the date, page number, title, author, etc that could in theory be entered. But I never got close to being able to figure out how to clobber the UI into letting me just enter the URL which would then allow a wizard to come along and do all the fancy stuff. Instead, I mentally know a perfectly good source for this statement about the death of Elie Abel, but that information is never going to get anywhere close to being in Wikidata. So no wizard will be able to come along later and improve on it.)

Wikidata has existed for well over a decade, and it still has no well documented tools fit for novices, for automating this kind of stuff? If this is a joke, the joke is on the whole community that's trying to use this database to maintain information about the world. Gnuish (talk) 02:59, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

We have WD:Tours, one of them focused on references. Given that you were able to navigate to Help:Sources, I wonder if we should advertise it somewhere on the page. (Yes, we definitely should.)

In fact, you were very close in the first attempt. should be used for Internet URLs as references was the key clue. Unfortunately, you were confused by Use 'Wikimedia import URL'... artifact, which, if you figured out how to navigate to Property:P854, says in full: Use "Wikimedia import URL" (P4656) for imports from WMF sites, i.e., nothing concerning your (actually very valuable) intent. There is no place to put a URL. It's really the field next to the 3 tiny boxes stacked vertically on the line.

IMO pasting in the URL and access date is enough: Special:Diff/2489675619. The rest should really be done by bots or citoid, the tool Wikipedias use to autofill citation templates, but the developers seem to have struggled for years to get the latter running here, too. (The problem is that Wikidata is structured more than Wikipedia where everything is basically a text.)

When I tried clicking "+ add reference" on the statement, it inserts an empty box labeled "Property" with three possible values in a menu ("reference URL", "retrieved" or "stated in"). Now imagine there was no such a suggestion...

Anyway, thanks for taking your time and writing this up. I think this deserves more attention than mine. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:59, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Oh! When I click "Add Reference" and then select "Reference URL", it makes a row in the page that has 3 vertically stacked boxes, a vertical bar, and a trashcan icon. THAT VERTICAL BAR is where I should be typing the URL. But in the usual width of my browser, it's so tiny it doesn't look like a place that I can type. If I widen the window, suddenly it grows and makes the situation obvious.

The wikidata editing page is FULL of whitespace that's relatively useless. I don't know why it compresses this field (that it wants me to fill in), down to nothing, while leaving tons of whitespace everywhere else. Gnuish (talk) 23:45, 15 August 2026 (UTC)