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[Spike] Explore Special Pages related to SDC, particularly EntityUsage
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Description

In previous tickets (T207683 and T211994), SDC engineers on the WMF and WMDE teams decided that many of the usual Special pages that come with Wikibase should be disabled because they either wouldn't work properly or could create problems. With federation and statement features now working, it's time to revisit this conversation and see if we're missing crucial functionality.

Specifics of the technical problem:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:EntityUsage/Q13395753 doesn't show https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leptothorax_kutteri.jpg (a file page which uses that Q ID for a depicts statement).

This could indicate a couple of problems (which may not actually be problems, but we have to explore further):

  1. If an item on Wikidata gets split into two more specific items, volunteers and tool builders need to be able to find out which Commons pages refer to the old item to make sure they will correclty refer to one of the two new items.
  2. Automated systems that check usage of Q entities might be missing Commons usage entirely.

Other people to be notified (devs etc):
Might need to reach out to WMDE for assistance.

Acceptance Criteria:

  • We arrive at a decision to either not support the special pages and use another method, or decide to make some of the special pages work and create a ticket to do so.

Event Timeline

For now, assigning to Matthias for exploration later in the week of 6/17

Yeah, this is a problem. I recently had a new Wikidata item (Q66458942) deleted, because the admin wasn't able to see that it was being used as a value in SDC statements on several files, even though he'd checked https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:EntityUsage/Q66458942 (cf discussion on admin's talk page).

As I understand it (and that understanding could be wrong, please re-open the ticket if it is), EntityUsage does not record/show usage of an item within claims in other entities.
It does, however, record usage of entities via Lua. Since having rolled out Lua support for MediaInfo entities (completed last week), those usages should now also show up in EntityUsage.

Thanks Matthias, but that doesn't seem to help with the use-cases above, if a claim is just sitting there as a claim, and not being used by any Lua template (as most "depicts" claims probably wouldn't be?)

Users and admins need some mechanism to identify whether a Wikidata item is being invoked by any claims, and if so which ones.

True. Do you have any idea if/how a similar scenario is currently handled in Wikidata?