Last modified: 2014-10-16 12:08:52 UTC
Today, the URL of a QRcode is langcode.qrwp.org/Article_name This should be complemented with a new default like d.qrwp.org/EntityID This code should get the language links from Wikidata directly and provides backwards compability. There is one obvious advantage with this, stability. If the article is moved on the originating Wikipedia and a new one is taking its place, the QR-code will point to a completely wrong article. (Probably a Template:For will be put in the top of that article, but that might not be true for other languages.) A disadvantage is that you always need to make a lookup to see what languages are available instead of heading of to the article directly if the originating article is in the same language as your phone. So if the $requested_language resolves to 'd' a separate piece of code is run where the call for language would then be something like https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbgetentities&props=sitelinks%2Furls&ids=$request This returns all sitelinks, and perhaps (or not) you would want to remove all non-wikipedias.
With the my second sentence I meant that when creating a new QR-code on qrpedia.org, this should generate a new wikidata-qrpedia-URL.
I would add that in such a case the generated QR code would be much smaller especially comparing to long non-Latin article names.
I support the idea, but this is not a small change (in particular because we need to keep the backward compatibilty).
I think this is an important change. I know that QRpedia codes have been printed on signs in a town in Sweden, codes pointing to the article [[:sv:Teaterladan]] ("Theatre barn", [[:en:Hedemora Gamla Theater]]). That article has been translated to many languages, but there are actually many barn theatres in Sweden. If any of the other barn theatres get a Wikipedia article, the QR-code will point to a disambiguation page, and that page will probably only be avaliable in Swedish.
The GoToLinkedPage functionality in Wikidata should be the first piece needed in order to get this to work. It doesn't have it's own language fallback yet but the existing one could possibly be reused? For backwards compatibility would it be possible to, internally, point all generated qr-codes to the current Wikidata-id? E.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:GoToLinkedPage/svwiki/Q1652884 and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:GoToLinkedPage/enwiki/Q1652884 would work for the example given above.
