We may wish to leverage the PHP type system for additional safety when breaking the long-standing fundamental assumption that wikibase-entityid refers to things that have been registered with the Wikibase Entity registration mechanism.
This task is about creating a proof of concept for that direction and outline its major aspects.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T91505 [Epic] Adding new datatypes to Wikidata (tracking) | |||
| Open | None | T214884 [ES-M2]: [EPIC] Linking EntitySchemas in statements | |||
| Resolved | • karapayneWMDE | T332139 [ES-M2]: Create a new EntitySchema data type | |||
| Open | None | T332157 [ES-M2]: Enable new EntitySchema data type on Wikidata | |||
| Open | None | T339920 [ES-M2]: Return EntitySchema as `wikibase-entityid` through the Action API | |||
| Resolved | None | T349239 Create suggestion for how to cleanly make the architectural changes needed | |||
| Declined | None | T350136 Investigate "PseudoEntityId-interface" approach for extending Wikibase in a type-safe way |
The result of this investigation can now be found at:
https://github.com/micgro42/WikibasePrototyping/compare/master...michael/poc/pseudoEntityIdInterface
https://github.com/micgro42/EntitySchemaPrototyping/compare/master...michael/poc/pseudoEntityIdInterface
The commits are not yet very meaningful, except that the last commit in each branch deals with Lua/ParserFunction access and usage tracking, as it is needed for MS 3. For now, it is assumed that only access to labels, descriptions, etc., on the repository wiki is required, so cross-wiki access, usage tracking and change dispatching has not been implemented yet.
This complements the investigation in T349686
I think it looks pretty good to me so far… I haven’t looked at all the changes in detail, but overall I certainly get the impression that IndeterminateEntityId is effective at flagging up all the places that need to be changed to accommodate pseudo-entity IDs.
As the EntitySchemas project is in a short hiatus, I am removing the relevant tickets from the board
We ended up deciding against this approach; instead, we’re working together with Wikibase Product Platform Team WPP to make the data value deserialization dependent on the data type, so that the values can have "type": "wikibase-entityid" in JSON but deserialize to a DataValue that is not an EntityIdValue. Some further investigation happened in T355144 and T360601.