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 forward for this)
- Step 3: deploy the WIkidata client extension on a second language edition of Wikipedia (Hebrew Wikipedia stepped forward)
- 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: the Wikidata team to provide a rather stable branch for review (done)
- Step 1.2: the ContentModel branch on master and the Sites management patchset to be reviewed and actually merged into core by early the week of October 1st
- Step 1.3: a security review by Chris of the lib and base code in the Wikibase extension and of the Diff extension before October 1st (done)
- Currently fixing the raised issues
- Step 1.4: a security review by Chris of the client code in the Wikibase extension and of ULS early October
- Step 1.5: a review of the DB impact by Asher in time for the planned deployment (I guess that would be before October 6 as well?)
- Step 1.6: deployment of the full-fledged repo, but still locked down for outside contribution, as a test system
- Step 1.7: two-week testing of the repo
- Step 1.8: launch of wikidata.org (i.e. the repo) either by opening the setup or by starting a new one
- Step 2: Deploy the Wikidata client extension on a first language
- Step 2.1: Decide on first language: Hungarian Wikipedia (done)
- Step 2.2: deployment of the client on test2 accessing the repo for its language links
- Step 2.3: Have a beta of a copy of the selected language Wikipedia, and run it on labs with the full extension setup
- Step 2.4: Stage the change
- Step 2.6: Deploy
- Step 3: Re-iterate the substeps for step 2 for Hebrew Wikipedia
- Step 4: Re-iterate the substeps for step 2 for English Wikipedia
- Step 5: Re-iterate the substeps for step2 for all other Wikipedias
Note that "when" in the plan does not mean a date but a condition.