I recently wrote a post looking at the history of the Wikibase “Federated Properties” feature. While at Wikimania 2025 the topic of federation came up a few times, particularly given the current discussions ongoing on the Wikidata project chat page including discussions about wikicite, and the recent Wikidata graph split.
All the code for the “Federated Properties” feature still exists in Wikibase code, despite a ticket being open on phabricator to potentially delete it. And it turns out that the configuration for it still exists on wikibase.cloud too, where the feature was initially presented to the communities to try out.
So with a little bit of sneaky “hacking”, I can try to summarize the current / final state of the “Federated Properties” feature, after development during the MVP stopped some years ago.
This also means you can still try out the feature on your own wiki using the setting.
$wgWBRepoSettings['federatedPropertiesEnabled'] = true;
Creating a local property
Firstly, we need a property, and the creation workflow is exactly the same as on a normal Wikibase.
