Update: Charlie will be working on this as her bachelor thesis. She'll start at the end of August.

@Incabell finished her thesis last week.

Incabell: please add a link to the pdf here once you've uploaded it to Commons and close this task then

@Lydia_Pintscher I'd like to keep working on the prototype on the side during the next six month. It needs another one or two iterations. Should I open a new task for that or should we use this one, since this technically still counts as research?

Let's plan those next steps and create new tickets for them, yeah.

In T130991, @IKhitron and @Kipod wrote:

Hello. We think it's a good idea to add a new parameter to templatedata, wikidata, which has a property ID for data that should be taken if the actual parameter is empty. For example: a parameter country in town template has required=true and also wikidata=P12345. It can help for different templatedata tools. For example, template wizards will use it as automatic start value. The template parameters validator we developed will alert on required parameter absence only if the parameter is empty and also there is no data in wikidata property. Thank you.

One of the problems that you will encounter is that the contents of an infobox are ultimately subject to consensus on individual articles (on the English Wikipedia at least). That implies, for example, that a "town template" can't have "country_required=true" coded into it as that level of decision-making is presently delegated to individual articles that use the template. The best we could accomplish without further central consensus is to ensure that an individual article can set something like "|country=_NODISPLAY_" which would override any template settings and suppress the display of the country field.

The RfC governing the use of Wikidata in infoboxes on en-wp is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Wikidata_Phase_2 - see Question 1, Option 4 discusion. Option 5 did not gain consensus. It is probably well out-of-date by now, but there's nothing else to refer to.

I see. If so, it will not work properly on enwiki, indeed. But maybe part of templates could use it, maybe even in different context, and other wp can steel use it well. We have no problems like those, because we are much smaller, and there is no problem to find a best option in community - there aren;t so many oppositioners, in numbers (crossing fingers).

Here is a link to my thesis on this topic.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AFacilitating_the_use_of_Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_projects_with_a_user-centered_design_approach.pdf

I'm still working on the topic to improve the prototype before considering implementation.