Synchronizing wiki data with external sources

TrickyFoxy · 2024-07-04T22:00:58.772Z

For example, is it possible to automatically change the version of an application based on data from GitHub?

Or the number of stars for a GitHub repository (for example, for this article)?

Or is the solution to this problem to write an external bot that will periodically check for updates and suggest edits for the article? Are there any examples of this?

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-07-04T22:24:00.485Z

@Tordanik used to run a bot that would synchronize these infoboxes with a centralized software listing per platform. This isn’t quite what you were asking about, but someone would need to run a similar bot that fetches the information from some external source.

That external source could be Wikidata. OSM community members have created Wikidata items about many of the applications or libraries documented on our wiki, for example, StreetComplete (Q56221667):

Since the item is tagged with a source code repository URL (P1324) statement, github-wiki-bot automatically updates its software version identifier (P348) property to indicate the latest tagged version. (I don’t know if this works for other Git hosts.)
Since the item has a Mastodon address (P4033) statement, the social media followers (P8687) property is being kept up-to-date with StreetComplete’s Mastodon follower count.
In principle, github-wiki-bot could track the GitHub star counts in the number of subscribers (P3744) property, but I don’t think this is implemented so far.

So if we care about maintaining this kind of information independently on our wiki, someone could take the source code for these bots and run their own instances of the bots, or they could run ListeriaBot to synchronize the infoboxes with Wikidata.

Sam_Wilson · 2024-07-05T02:05:28.477Z

I’ve been working on a MediaWiki extension for pulling data from Wikidata. It’s not completely ready yet (although it is being used in production on some sites), but could perhaps be an idea for the future if there are more things that need to be kept in sync with Wikidata.

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-07-05T02:24:32.821Z

Very cool! Since it’s geared toward wikis that aren’t Wikibase clients, do you anticipate that this extension would be compatible with a wiki that already has its own Wikibase instance, or would that be the job of federated properties?

Sam_Wilson · 2024-07-05T02:45:56.523Z

No the idea is that it’d work fine for wikis that also are connected to a different WikibaseRepo. There’s an optional feature that can be turned on that attempts to mimic parts of WikibaseClient (i.e. the {{#statements}} parser function), but I’m not convinced that’s a good way to go. Basically, the extension is just a Lua wrapper around pulling some JSON data from a Wikibase install, taking care of caching.