Wikidata-powered Infoboxes for Wikipedia: {{Databox}}

A simple way to add reliable, Wikidata-backed facts to your Wikipedia article

Anyone familiar with Wikipedia will probably have come across the handy rectangle of handy-facts known as infoboxes. Found in a huge range of articles across all the Wikimedia projects, they present a concise summary of information to readers.

Undoubtedly, they are convenient and powerful, but adding them to an article isn’t always so easy.

Infoboxes can be a barrier for less-experienced editors who haven’t yet mastered the wikitext-syntax and structured layout to build and populate them. This List of Infoboxes also demonstrates how flexible they are, to suit a wide array of subjects. Yet it can be tricky to identify the right infobox for the article topic, and more so to understand the parameters and expected input used to fill the infobox with information.

But there exists an incredibly convenient and easy-to-use version, constructing an entire infobox with the use of one simple word: {{Databox}}.

What is ‘Databox’?

At the 2018 Wikimedia Hackathon, two Wikidatians, User:Tpt and User:Tobias1984, recognised that smaller-language Wikipedias often struggle to populate and maintain article content, particularly when they have fewer active or experienced editors.

To address this need, they created databox – a completely automated infobox, entirely populated by Wikidata

Wikidata offers a convenient and practical solution: it already contains a vast amount of multilingual, structured data ready to be reused across Wikimedia projects. Not to mention, Wikidata centralises knowledge – if an update is made on a Wikidata statement, the update is reflected on every page it appears.

For wikis that struggle with resources, experience, or no. of active editors, this can be a huge boon for reducing the time spent maintaining and updating infobox content.

If you have ever been keen to start a new article only to be hit by writer’s block, databox is here to help by providing a full list of data known about its Wikidata item. Even if the databox doesn’t make it into the finished article, it can provide a starting point or help flesh-out an article for editors.

Want to try Databox yourself?*

Databox is intentionally low-friction by nature, designed to be easy-to-install and use, called with a single word between the template curly brackets – {{Databox}}. But before it’s ready to be used, it needs to be installed to your local wiki.

Fortunately, there’s a step-by-step guide for the whole process, here’s a preview:

Recently, the Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team at Wikimedia Deutschland spoke with databox champions to collect ideas on how we can expand the databox and incorporate their ideas to allow more local content control over the databox.

• useImage
  Databoxes automatically adds an image (if one is available), but this parameter acts as an override, allowing you to choose a different one from the Wikidata item.
  
• excludeParameters
  Databoxes return and present nearly all statements found on their Wikidata item.
  An exclusion list exists that applies to all databoxes on the wiki, but this parameter allows a comma-separated list of statements to hide from the current databox only.

More information, including setup and usage instructions, can be found on the Wikidata databox page.

If you are already using databox in your wiki and have important feedback, or would like to start using databox but aren’t sure how, please contact us on this Project page.

* please check your Wiki’s policy on using Wikidata in your article before installing.