This page gives a draft of the Wikidata deployment plan. The goal for Wikidata is to release early, release often, and to eventually follow WMF's lead with their bi-weekly deployment cycle.
The very first version of Wikidata to deploy is almost there. We still have a number of bugs and wrinkles we are polishing, but in general we are ready to start moving towards deployment.
This will lead to a very organic introduction of Wikidata data into the Wikipedias. We can react to problems and use cases early. I think a plan where we implement the three phases completely and deploy them then is bound to lead to a less widely accepted solution.
Overview
The suggestion is to deploy the following steps. This all still only covers phase I.
- Step 1: start the Wikidata repository wiki. This only allows to add language links, and they are not displayed anywhere yet.
- Step 2: deploy the Wikidata client extension on one language edition of Wikipedia for testing (Hungarian Wikipedia stepped up for this)
- Step 3: deploy the WIkidata client extension on a second language edition of Wikipedia (Q: How to select it?)
- Step 4: deploy the Wikidata client extension on the English edition of Wikipedia
- Step 5: deploy on all Wikipedias.
Meanwhile we start developing Phase 2, and then also deployment of Phase 2 in a similarly staged manner:
- Enabling simple statements (i.e. "San Francisco - State -> California")
- Introduce sources
- Introduce qualifiers
- Introducing data type by data type (based on their prevalence in the current Wikipedia: links, geo coordinates, dates, numbers, etc.)
- In parallel allow exploiting these properties in the Wikipedias, i.e. deploy the query syntax there as soon as possible (probably again language by language at first)
Questions
I would like achieve agreement on the following questions:
- Are steps 1-5 presented above the right steps?
- If they are, which languages do we choose for step 3 and 4? By which criteria?
- How do we actually implement steps 1-5, i.e. what does who need to do in order to make them happen, step by step?
Detailed implementation plan
Step 1: Launch Wikidata
- Step 1.1: Set up a beta instance for Wikidata, including all extensions the repository should run, configure it. Who? When?
- Step 1.2: security-review the repository code. Who? When?
- Step 1.3: Stage Wikidata for deployment. Who? When?
- Step 1.4: Go live. Note that this only covers the repository, the data entered here would not be used anywhere yet. Who? When?
Step 2: Deploy the Wikidata client extension on a first language
- Step 2.1: Select language. Who? When?
- Step 2.2: Re-Review the client code, as this will go live on Wikipedia. Who? When?
- Step 2.3: Deploy to test2. Who? When?
- Step 2.4: Have a beta of a copy of the selected language Wikipedia, and run it on labs with the full extension setup. Who? When?
- Step 2.5: Stage the change. Who? When?
- Step 2.6: Deploy. Who? When?
- Step 3-5: Re-iterate the substeps for step 2.
Note that "when" in the plan does not mean a date but a condition.