Tools and tips for small Wikis to increase content and quality
Helmi HAMDI [[Helmoony]] - Wikimania 2018.
July 19th, 2018.
Main idea
As advanced users of small Wikis, you need to direct new edits to the main namespace and into articles with a community value.
By creating in advance categories/generic articles/templates, editing time could be dedicated to creating text with higher quality.
Leo za1 CC-BY-SA 3.0
Disambiguation
Article
External links
Navigation templates
Categories
Portals
Stub template
Infobox
On Arabic Wikipedia, we were always explaining to new editors what are categories and how to add them. Then, we decided to implement radical solutions.
It’s already done somewhere else!
Equivalent categories bot
A bot (source code) that copies the equivalent categories (if linked and existing) from a selected Wikipedia to your Wikipedia.
Article about a South African basketball player in Arabic without categories
The article in English Wikipedia has a category South African Basketball players
+
Equivalent categories bot
Category in Arabic added to the article if existing
Then, we said what can we do more?
Started using the bot for sister projects
Added Wikidata as an alternative categories source
Even more?
Use the same method for other parts of articles
Equivalent portal banner bot
Only 3% of Arabic Wikipedia articles are without portals. Why? We import portal templates from equivalent articles on French and English Wikipedias.
For the remaining articles, we started deducting portals using Wikidata properties.
The bot will add to a South African basketball player these portals:
Before that, we easily created generic portals for countries, sports, sciences, decades using frames and templates. We also developed super portals like Biography and Human settlement to be sure to have at least one portal per article.
1983 in films category
Equivalent stub template bot
The tool has the same principle
⇒ we add the equivalent stub template
But what if the English article is no longer a stub?
⇒ we add a stub template
External links module
External Links (source code) is a module that replaces a lot of small templates for the external links section. Social media template does the same for social media external links.
What you need to do is translate the module in your language and use it exclusively in the specific section. Links will be generated from Wikidata.
What about navigation templates?
Template translator
Templates translator is a tool that helps you translate templates automatically by simply adding the link from the English template. Few hours later, a bot will translate it entirely (using Wikidata labels/Wikipedia existing articles).
A second tool called Templates distributor, distributes the generated template into the mentioned articles in that template.
What about navigation templates?
What about navigation templates?
What about navigation templates?
Disambiguation pages creator
This tool (source code) automatically creates disambiguation articles based on the existing articles in the local Wiki.
The Arabic equivalent, for example, of the page Athens (disambiguation) contains now 10 links and is updated automatically if another article starting with the word Athens is created.
The bot also adds a disambiguation template in the beginning of the related pages.
What about navigation templates?
What about navigation templates?
Generic bot articles procedure
To create generic articles, you need to:
In Arabic Wikipedia, for example, articles related to numbers, species, cities, years and years by country have been created by that way.
What about navigation templates?
Wikidata based Infoboxes
Forget about creating infoboxes for cities per country, infoboxes about persons by profession, companies by field, etc.
Create large standard inboxes : human settlement, human, taxon/species, company, ..
Show references from Wikidata whitin inboxes to increase the quality of your article
What about navigation templates?
Is there disadvantages for using those tools?
Limits
Enkosi!