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StarterKit Essential Tasks: Create and add infoboxes to articles
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Description

Overview

As part of the Essential Tasks block in the Starter Kit Dashboard, we need to implement a card that helps admins import basic infobox templates from the en wiki and use them in articles. This gives the wiki a more structured, consistent article format and makes key information easier for readers to scan.

Interactive prototype: Link

Screenshot:
{F76251588 size=full}

User journey

  1. Select article/infobox types. The app presents article type tiles such as "Person", "Place", "Organization", etc that map to specific infobox templates. The admin have to select the types that they want to import.
  1. Translate/name the templates to import. For each selected type, the app shows a template-name input pre-filled with the English default such as "Infobox person." The admin can keep the default or replace it with a name in their own language. The app explains that this is the name editors will type when adding the template to articles.
  1. Confirm import. The app previews the infoboxes that will be imported, including their field names and intended usage, if necessary. The admin confirms, and the app imports the templates on the wiki.
  1. Open and localize. The app confirms that the infoboxes are now live on the wiki. The admin can open any template directly and translate field labels into their language by editing the template wikitext.
  1. Add to articles. The app scans the wiki for matching articles that do not yet use the newly imported infoboxes and presents them as a pick list. The admin selects articles one by one, opens each in a new tab with the infobox pre-inserted, fills in the fields, and saves. The app detects each completed edit and tracks progress toward the goal.
  1. Completion. The task unlocks completion after infoboxes have been added to 5 articles.

Card implementation details

Category: Editing
Tool: Template import
Difficulty: Intermediate

Details

Related Changes in GitLab:
TitleReferenceAuthorSource BranchDest Branch
Feat: treat out-of-sync infobox modules as non-blocking warningsrepos/lpl/starterkit-v1!78ngkountasfeat/infobox-out-of-sync-warningmain
Feat: add "Import an infobox template" essential taskrepos/lpl/starterkit-v1!68ngkountasfeat/add-infobox-toolmain
Customize query in GitLab

Event Timeline

For this task there was a question that came up on how can we find appropriate articles for specific infoboxes? @srishakatux any thoughts?

srishakatux renamed this task from StarterKit Essential Tasks: Import infoboxes from en wiki and use them in articles to StarterKit Essential Tasks: Create and add infoboxes to articles.Apr 30 2026, 9:56 PM

For this task there was a question that came up on how can we find appropriate articles for specific infoboxes? @srishakatux any thoughts?

Aha, I am not entirely sure about the technical feasibility here, but wondering if there is a way to identify articles without an infobox and then use the article categories to infer the most appropriate infobox for that article?

Maybe Wikidata Query Service or PetScan could help with this? That said, I can also imagine that on smaller wikis the categorization might not be consistent enough to make this reliable. I am thinking 🤔

First thing that comes to my mind would be to match infoboxes to Cirrus search topics (e.g. Infobox person --> Biography, Infobox settlement -> Geography, etc), and then find articles in these topics, filter them based on whether they have an infobox and suggest the ones without infobox. I'm not sure whether this will work well for small wikis, though, as I noticed that a lot of the articles do not belong to any topic according to the "Get articletopic outlink prediction" tool.

@ngkountas In "Step 2 of 3: Confirm infoboxes to create", you will see that the hint points to the created infoboxes being simplified versions designed for new and small wikis. They can be expanded as the wiki grows. So the infobox template will not have all the fields, only a few.

From a technical standpoint, do you see any concerns with this approach or if it would be difficult to expand the template later? From a design standpoint, I thought that instead of importing an infobox from another wiki that might require users to update lots of fields in order for it to be reusable, starting with a simpler version might be easier. Thoughts?

@ngkountas We can probably discuss this more on the call next week, but in a meeting today with @jhsoby he suggested a quite different approach from what I had been proposing. His recommendation is that, instead of encouraging communities to create different types of local infoboxes, we should consider importing Databox as the preferred solution: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/02/23/wikidata-powered-infoboxes-for-wikipedia-databox/

His reasoning was that Databox, being Wikidata-based, does not require local editing and is therefore much easier for beginner communities to maintain. He also mentioned that complex locally maintained infobox ecosystems work on English Wikipedia because they have thousands of active contributors, but newer and smaller language communities usually do not have that capacity. According to him, Databox is already designed in a simplified way for new wikis.

ngkountas updated https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/lpl/starterkit-v1/-/merge_requests/78

Feat: treat out-of-sync infobox modules as non-blocking warnings

eamedina merged https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/lpl/starterkit-v1/-/merge_requests/78

Feat: treat out-of-sync infobox modules as non-blocking warnings