User:LennardHofmann/GSoC 2022/Report 4

In the last three weeks, I made the image switching gadget translatable, fixed various little things in the infobox, rewrote the footer in Lua, started working on autocat, and attended Wikimania.

I'm aiming to complete autocat and make the changes live next week. This will finally allow the infobox to be used on Category:COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia again without memory errors.

I also discovered that some of the issues I commented on in the last two reports had already been reported on Phabricator:

• Create Lua convenience functions for conversion between language and sitelink code
• mw.wikibase.getBestStatements is slow when used on objects with many properties

External identifiers

Today, I decided to investigate one bug that has been puzzling me for weeks: the lack of hyperlinks when the values of IUCN taxon ID (P627) get formatted for display in the infobox. My initial guess was that the problem had to do with caching because P627's formatter URL had been recently edited—but that edit is now almost a month old. So clearly, something was off. Using the Wikidata Query Service, I obtained a list of properties that have a formatter URL (P1630) and are of datatype string or external-id, along with a sample statement for each property. Then I ran mw.wikibase.formatValue() on the statements and filtered the output for plain, unlinked values. This way I identified some other properties with the same problem. Can you find out what they have in common?

• HURDAT ID (P502)
• IUCN taxon ID (P627)
• Foundational Model of Anatomy ID (P1402)
• Patientplus ID (P1461)
• ICD-9-CM (P1692)
• NCI Thesaurus ID (P1748)
• RSL scanned publication ID (P1815)
• NIOSH Pocket Guide ID (P1931)
• ISOCAT ID (P2263)
• Classification of Instructional Programs code (P2357)
• WikiPathways ID (P2410)
• Artsy gene (P2411)
• page at OSTIS Belarus Wiki (P2490)
• FIFA country code (P3441)
• WMI code (P6793)
• ISCO-08 occupation class (P8283)

Solution
All properties are of datatype string. You will often find proposals on their talk pages to change the datatype to external-id. Please raise your opinion there and check the previous discussions. When there is clear consensus to change the datatype of a property, we can open a Phabricator task similar to phab:T253722.

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