PathfinderWiki:Semantic Data Initiative

From PathfinderWiki

TLDR

A change to the biggest templates and how they are used. Introduction of the Facts: namespace. Making things easier to edit.

Reasoning

The wikis (Pathfinder + Starfinder) have had a lot of technical upgrades in the last year. These allow us to improve many parts of the wiki to make them more friendly to editors and readers. If we use these features we can make editing the wikis easier and give readers a better experience. The main advantage will be that we can generate indices much simpler. These are used basically everywhere on the wiki, e.g.:

  • Artists have tables of the credits of their work as well as a gallery of their images in this wiki
  • Authors have a list of the books they contributed to
  • the new products slider shows the newest products released
  • the release calendar is a list of all product releases
  • the portal pages are lists of their respective things
  • adventure paths contain a list of the products belonging to the adventure path

All of these require us to update information in multiple locations, which often does not happen.

Goals

  • Split of facts from the articles themselves to create a solid knowledge graph.
  • Make editing this knowledge graph easy to understand and edit.
  • Use the knowledge graph to fill infoboxes and index tables.
  • Add the ability to add sources to facts. (e.g. references)
  • Keep the ability to add arbitrary information to infoboxes outside of the facts system.
  • Make it easy to use knowledge graph facts within texts.

Non-Goals

  • Change the fundamental workflow of editing articles.

How will this look in the future?

The article itself

The article itself will smaller since the infoboxes will be much reduced in size. This could look something like this for Absalom: 

{{Badges|featured}}{{Infobox City|Absalom (City)}}{{Infobox Nation|Absalom (Nation)}}
For more than 4,000 years...

The facts page

Since the Absalom article concerns itself with the nation and the city there would be two corresponding facts pages. Facts:Absalom (City) and Facts:Absalom (Nation). We will use the City facts page for this example. It would look something like this: 

{{Facts:City
| name= Absalom
| title=City at the Center of the World;Patchwork City;City of Buried Treasures;Jewel of the Inner Sea
...
}}

There will also be an effort to have a form for editing facts pages instead of editing the wikitext directly to make it easier.

Steps

This is the step-by-step plan. Further substeps will be added when new steps are started.

  1. Set up the general facts system
    1. Set up facts namespace
    2. Check feasibility of using forms for fact pages
  2. Book + Book Content
    1. Create the fact properties/forms
    2. Copy existing knowledge to the facts pages
    3. Create infobox based on facts system
    4. Check for starfinder specific differences
    5. Integrate Adventure template into new template on PF and SF
    6. Integrate current Book template documentation to the book form
    7. Replace infoboxes in articles with fact based infoboxes (this is the moment where user facing changes happen)
    8. Replace content within articles with a new template
    9. create credits templates that can be used on any author/artist page
    10. update the book related Portal pages (no longer part of this as there is now a portal initiative)
  3. Update other product templates
    1. Accessory
    2. Map
    3. Miniatures
    4. Audio
    5. Video game
    6. Deck
  4. Change the new products slide and release calendar to be based on the facts system
    1. products slider
    2. release calendar
  5. look into applying the facts system to creating nice references automatically
  6. Create facts for automatic cross-referencing of named entities within all PDFs
  7. Add time events
  • Other existing infobox types
    • There has been no decision if these should or could be part of this initiative. They are included here for completeness sake.
      • Abyssal realm
      • Alchemical item
      • Arcane school
      • Biography
      • City
      • Class
      • Company
      • Cosmos
      • Creature
      • Deity
      • Domain
      • Hellknight Orders
      • Help
      • Item
      • Magic item
      • Nation
      • Organization
      • Person
      • Planar vehicle
      • Plane
      • Prestige class
      • Region
      • RPG Superstar
      • Ship
      • Spell
        • Spell2e
      • Technological item
      • Vehicle

Manual TODOs for book references

  1. Resolve all ambiguous references here: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Cite/Bestiary_(Disambiguation) -Oznogon (talk) 16:37, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
  2. Look through the following pages and fix usage of {{Ref|note}}. Either remove duplicate usages of the note if appropriate or replace {{Ref|Book|page}} with 
    <ref name="abc">{{Cite/Book|page}}something</ref>

Semantic data cheatsheet

Adapted from Old School RuneScape Wiki.

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Defining attributes

Code Display Function
[[foo::bar]] bar Defines the property "foo" as bar and creates a link to bar
[[foo::bar|baz]] baz Defines the property "foo" as bar and creates a link to bar on the text "baz"
[[foo::bar| ]] Defines the property "foo" as bar and creates no text
{{#set:foo=bar}} Defines the property "foo" as bar and displays nothing. Multiple properties can be defined this way.

Note: Use {{#set}} if defining properties in the content namespaces. 

-- setup data table - standard key-value pairs where key is property name and value is property value
local data1 = {
    foo = 'bar',
    ['Has property2'] = 'value2'
}
-- set the properties
local result1 = mw.smw.set(data1)

if result1 == true then
    -- everything fine
else
    -- error message is in result1.error
end


-- setup data table - an array of strings, in format 'propname=propvalue'
local data2 = {
    'foo=bar',
    'Has property2=value2'
}
-- set the properties
local result2 = mw.smw.set(data2)

if result2 == true then
    -- everything fine
else
    -- error message is in result2.error
end
Used in lua modules to set data, similarly to the {{#set}} parser function - all methods are equivalent, so use whichever is easier for the module at the time. See SemanticScribunto documentation for more information. 
-- setup data table - multiple property values for one property
local data3 = {
    foo = {
        'bar',
        'baz',
        'qok'
    }
}
-- set the properties
local result3 = mw.smw.set(data3)

if result3 == true then
    -- everything fine
else
    -- error message is in result3.error
end
As above, but setting multiple values to the same property.

Retrieving attributes with #ask

Code Function
[[Category:Foo]] Finds all pages that are in category "foo"
?foo Shows the property "foo" of all results
limit=X Confines the displayed results to limit X
offset=X Begins the search at an offset of X
[[foo::bar]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is equal to "bar"
[[foo::!bar]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is not equal to "bar"
[[foo::>X]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is greater than or equal to X
[[foo::>>X]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is greater than X
[[foo::<X]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is less than or equal to X
[[foo::<<X]] Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is less than X
[[foo::bar||baz]]

[[foo::bar]] OR [[foo::baz]]

Finds all pages that contain a property of "foo" that is "bar" or "baz"

Lua

For details on fetching information via lua, see mw.smw.ask documentation.

Retrieving attributes with #show

Code Function
{{#show:Bar|?foo}} Shows the property "foo" of page Bar
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