When Wikinews projects close tomorrow (T421796: Close 31 editions of Wikinews on 2026-05-04 (make them read-only)), we would probably need to figure out how to handle that on the Wikidata side. With it no longer being an official Wikimedia project, we should probably remove sitelinks (in the "In other projects" sidebar section) from view as a first step.
Description
Description
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T425261 Figure out how to handle Wikinews closure on Wikidata side | |||
| Resolved | Ladsgroup | T421796 Close 31 editions of Wikinews on 2026-05-04 (make them read-only) |
Event Timeline
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@Lucas_Werkmeister_WMDE suggested adding CSS to hide sitelinks to Wikinews in the WikimediaCustomization extension.
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Can we clarify what we want to achieve?
- Prevent people from adding new sitelinks but preserve existing ones
- Remove them completely from Wikidata (i.e. delete existing ones and prevent new ones from being added)
- Keep the sitelinks but "hide" them from UI view
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I think the most immediate need for now is just the latter.
The first one might have been ok, except I think there are a lot of edge cases that could complicate things. If we prevent adding new sitelinks, that could inadvertently prevent people from reverting an item to an older revision that had a Wikinews sitelink (e.g. when undoing incorect merges), so I think that as long as Wikinews sitelinks are present in Wikidata, adding them too should be allowed. Instead of disallowing it, though, it would be nice to have an abusefilter that tags such edits, and/or warns the user who adds them. Does that make sense?
The main point of this task, though, is just to figure out what to do. We could split it into several subtasks for each specific thing when we reach an understanding.
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My assumption is that, as the Wikinews sites still exist, we still want to have language links between them (e.g. this random article from another task has versions in French and Polish). So I suspect we want to keep Wikinews sitelinks on Wikidata, at least on some items; but we don’t want to show a link to Wikinews on e.g. every village pump, so we could use WikimediaCustomizations (or a similar extension – perhaps WikimediaBadges?) to hide the sitelinks from display there.
Alternatively, the archived Wikinews sites could have their language links powered in some non-Wikidata way; we could have transformed them back into [[en:wikitext langlinks]] with a bot, but it might be too late for that now.
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so we could use WikimediaCustomizations (or a similar extension – perhaps WikimediaBadges?) to hide the sitelinks from display there.
Instead of hiding, we can collapse it by default and have a icon showing Wikinews is closed, so user can still maintain sitelinks.
but it might be too late for that now.
GIE can still edit closed wiki.
Alternatively, we may consider replacing all Wikinews with static HTML dumps (while keeping XML dumps), so we can completely purge Wikinews sitelinks from Wikidata.
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Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-cloud) [2026-05-11T14:54:24Z] <wmbot~lucaswerkmeister-wmde@tools-bastion-15> deployed 8378c0e9bd (drop wikinews from output; cc T425261)