Data Quality Days, September 8-15, a series of community-powered events on the topic of data quality. If you're interested in presenting a tool or a topic, feel free to add something to the schedule.
Depictor is a mobile-friendly tool to verify if people depicted on Wikimedia Commons are the same, and adds structured data statements (using Wikidata)
Nicolas Vigneron (User:VIGNERON, User:VIGNERON en résidence) has started a one-year residence at the libraries of Clermont-Ferrand, more info and batch upload to come
WikidataCon update: news about the online conference, grants for affiliates in Latin America and Carribean, glimpse on the keynotes topics and next steps
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Some musical score syntax no longer works and may needed to be updated, you can check Category:Pages with score rendering errors on your wiki for a list of pages with errors.
Problems
Musical scores were unable to render lyrics in some languages because of missing fonts. This has been fixed now. If your language would prefer a different font, please file a request in Phabricator. [1]
Changes later this week
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).
Future changes
You will be able to read but not edit Commons for a few minutes on 6 September. This will happen around 05:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance.
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 13 September. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [2]
Data Quality Days - a week of all things data quality around Wikidata from Septempber 8th to 15th. Check the schedule, join sessions and add more if you would like to facilitate a discussion or workshop!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: developing Wikidata tools and gadgets with Andrew Lih. [3], Sep 7th.
LIVE Wikidata editing #52 - YouTube, Facebook, September 11 at 18:00 UTC
Template:Generic queries for authors : new generic queries template designed for authors (fiction and non-fiction). Feedback and translations are welcome.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:SuccuBot has made its 100.000.000th edit. It is the first user account in Wikidata to reach this milestone.
In the frame of a Google Summer of Code project a new tool, called WikidataComplete was created. The tool smoothly integrates in the Wikidata UI and proposes new statements extracted by machine learning algorithms. Editors are asked to either approve or reject them. To activate it check here for a short tutorial check here. Any feedback is welcome here.
Continued work on the Mismatch Finder. We are now working on creating the page where mismatches will be listed for review.
Worked on support for "separators" parameter for distinct value constraints (phab:T277855)
Made it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Added a new constraint type to ensure that the Item has a label in a particular language (phab:T195178)
Added a button for the Query Builder to query.wikidata.org to make the Query builder discoverable (phab:T276210) - integration in the example dialog is still in progress (phab:T280229)
We started work on some behind-the-scenes improvements to the way Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about a change that affects their articles. (They need this notification so the article can be purged and show the latest data from Wikidata again. It is also required for showing the edit in the watchlist and recent changes on those wikis. This should have no visible impact for editors but is needed maintenance work.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The wikis that have Growth features deployed have been part of A/B testing since deployment, in which some newcomers did not receive the new features. Now, all of the newcomers on 21 of the smallest of those wikis will be receiving the features. [4]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
In 2017, the provided jQuery library was upgraded from version 1 to 3, with a compatibility layer. The migration will soon finish, to make the site load faster for everyone. If you maintain a gadget or user script, check if you have any JQMIGRATE errors and fix them, or they will break. [5][6]
Last year, the Portuguese Wikipedia community embarked on an experiment to make log-in compulsory for editing. The impact report of this trial is ready. Moving forward, the Anti-Harassment Tools team is looking for projects that are willing to experiment with restricting IP editing on their wiki for a short-term experiment. Learn more.
Transbordados: WikidataCon's preconference for Latin America - September 14, 21 and 28 (21h UTC) - with simultaneous translation for Portuguese and Spanish, via YouTube - set of events to discuss Wikidata and decoloniality, knowledge organization and digital dissemination of collections in Latin America contexts. Join us!
14/09 - Towards a decolonial wiki: overflowing knowledge from the Latin American horizon - speakers: Amanda Jurno (Wiki Movimento Brasil), Bianca Santana (journalist, writer and activist) and Silvia Gutiérrez (El Colégio de México) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
21/09 - The universe of libraries: Wikidata and the multiplication of knowledge potencies - speakers: Lilian Viana (GLAM das Bibliotecas da USP) and Maurício Genta (Wikimedia Argentina e Biblioteca Nacional da Argentina) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
28/09 - Digital collections and Wikidata: organizing a network of knowledge - speakers: Evelin Heidel (a.k.a. Scann; Wikimedistas do Uruguai) and Karen Worcman (Museu da Pessoa) - watch it in PT-BR / ES
Demo of the Query Builder live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, September 14 at 18:00 CEST
Ongoing:
Data Quality Days - several sessions happened over the past days and more are coming this week. Recordings, slides and notes are linked in the program
Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata is a browser extension that allows you to view and edit Wikidata information from Wikipedia (demo video). Install it in Firefox or Chrome
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Face The Facts mobile app allows you to scan election posters and see the true facts about politicians.
Mismatch Finder: The website part of the tool is taking shape but is not quite functional yet. We worked on creating the results page. You can see the current very much not finished state at https://mismatch-finder.toolforge.org/
Linked the Query Builder from the Query Service so it is discoverable (phab:T280229)
Finished work on normalizing filenames when linking to media files on Commons (phab:T251480)
All new wbstack.com wikis will now be created with elastic search support, including Wikibase indexes! All existing sites will have elastic search soon! (Source)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features. The Growth team has published an FAQ page about the features. This translatable FAQ covers the description of the features, how to use them, how to change the configuration, and more.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 September. It will be on all wikis from 16 September (calendar).
Starting this week, Wikipedia in Italian will receive weekly software updates on Wednesdays. It used to receive the updates on Thursdays. Due to this change, bugs will be noticed and fixed sooner. [9]
You can add language links in the sidebar in the new Vector skin again. You do this by connecting the page to a Wikidata item. The new Vector skin has moved the language links but the new language selector cannot add language links yet. [10]
The syntax highlight tool marks up code with different colours. It now can highlight 23 new code languages. Additionally, golang can now be used as an alias for the Go programming language, and a special output mode has been added to show a program's output. [11][12]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Bionomia and maintaining Wikidata synchrony with David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). [13], Sep 21st.
Lightning Talk: Wikidata in your Civic Tech project | Summit 2021 - YouTube
Continuing the work on the Mismatch Finder. This week we focused on the remaining groundwork for showing the first mismatches for review.
Continuing to work on improvements to the underlying system of how edits are propagated from Wikidata to the other Wikimedia projects.
Implemented two improvements for constraints: the “distinct values” constraint type now supports the “separator” parameter (phab:T277855) and we no longer check qualifiers on some unusual™ properties (phab:T235292)
Adding tags to some of the remaining UI edits that didn't get them yet for edits on Lexemes (phab:T290950)
Making it possible to add tags to some remaining Lexeme API modules (phab:T290951)
Fixed a bug in the Query Builder where it didn't show labels when opening an existing visual query from a shared link (phab:T280684)
Made the Query Builder more visible in the Query Service UI (phab:T280229)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
MediaWiki had a feature that would highlight local links to short articles in a different style. Each user could pick the size at which "stubs" would be highlighted. This feature was very bad for performance, and following a consultation, has been removed. [14]
A technical change was made to the MonoBook skin to allow for easier maintenance and upkeep. This has resulted in some minor changes to HTML that make MonoBook's HTML consistent with other skins. Efforts have been made to minimize the impact on editors, but please ping Jon (WMF) on wiki or in phabricator if any problems are reported.
Problems
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of an accidental restart of the search servers. [15]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 September. It will be on all wikis from 23 September (calendar).
The meta=proofreadpage API has changed. The piprop parameter has been renamed to prpiprop. API users should update their code to avoid unrecognized parameter warnings. Pywikibot users should upgrade to 6.6.0. [16]
Future changes
The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "Discussion tools" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [17]
The previously announced change to how you obtain tokens from the API has been delayed to September 21 because of an incompatibility with Pywikibot. Bot operators using Pywikibot can follow T291202 for progress on a fix, and should plan to upgrade to 6.6.1 when it is released.
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia an Observable notebook which computes the share of articles created on fr.wikipedia.org by gender using P21 property through Wikidata's API.
Changed the formatting of low year numbers so that they now show as e.g. “5 CE” instead of “5” to reduce ambiugity in dates like “March 5 (CE)” (phab:T104750)
Working on fixing an issue where two Properties could have the same label in a given language (phab:T289473)
Working on preventing a few more cases where two Items could have the same sitelink (phab:T291377)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing to work on showing mismatches on the results page so that they can be reviewed
Continuing to work on technical improvements to how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
iOS 15 has a new function called Private Relay (Apple website). This can hide the user's IP when they use Safari browser. This is like using a VPN in that we see another IP address instead. It is opt-in and only for those who pay extra for iCloud. It will come to Safari users on OSX later. There is a technical discussion about what this means for the Wikimedia wikis.
Problems
Some gadgets and user-scripts add items to the portlets (article tools) part of the skin. A recent change to the HTML may have made those links a different font-size. This can be fixed by adding the CSS class .vector-menu-dropdown-noicon. [18]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 September. It will be on all wikis from 30 September (calendar).
The GettingStarted extension was built in 2013, and provides an onboarding process for new account holders in a few versions of Wikipedia. However, the recently developed Growth features provide a better onboarding experience. Since the vast majority of Wikipedias now have access to the Growth features, GettingStarted will be deactivated starting on 4 October. [19]
A small number of users will not be able to connect to the Wikimedia wikis after 30 September. This is because an old root certificate will no longer work. They will also have problems with many other websites. Users who have updated their software in the last five years are unlikely to have problems. Users in Europe, Africa and Asia are less likely to have immediate problems even if their software is too old. You can read more.
You can receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on user talk page or mentions you in a talk page comment. Clicking the notification link will now bring you to the comment and highlight it. Previously, doing so brought you to the top of the section that contained the comment. You can find more information in T282029.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them has been enabled for the following 10 wikis: mediawiki.org, the Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Vietnamese Wikipedias, French Wikisource, and English Wikivoygage, Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikinews. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist on those wikis you can let the developers know.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 October. It will be on all wikis from 7 October (calendar).
Some gadgets and bots that use the API to read the AbuseFilter log might break. The hidden property will no longer say an entry is implicit for unsuppressed log entries about suppressed edits. If your bot needs to know this, do a separate revision query. Additionally, the property will have the value false for visible entries; previously, it wasn't included in the response. [21]
A more efficient way of sending changes from Wikidata to Wikimedia wikis that show them will be enabled for all production wikis. If you notice anything strange about how changes from Wikidata appear in recent changes or your watchlist you can let the developers know.
Future changes
You can soon get cross-wiki notifications in the iOS Wikipedia app. You can also get notifications as push notifications. More notification updates will follow in later versions. [22]
The JavaScript variables wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, wgLegalTitleChars, and wgIllegalFileChars will soon be removed from mw.config. These are not part of the "stable" variables available for use in wiki JavaScript. [23]
The JavaScript variables wgCookiePrefix, wgCookieDomain, wgCookiePath, and wgCookieExpiration will soon be removed from mw.config. Scripts should instead use mw.cookie from the "mediawiki.cookie" module. [24]
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Finished preventing a case where the same sitelink could be added to two different Items (phab:T291377)
Continuing work on the Mismatch Finder. Currently focusing on showing the details of the mismatches to the person reviewing mismatches.
Continued work on not allowing two Properties to have the same label after undo/revert (phab:T289473)
Continuing work on improving how changes on Wikidata are propagated to Wikipedia and the other other Wikimedia projects. The new system is being rolled out to all wikis now. It should not change anything for editors and just be a technical improvement in the backend.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 October. It will be on all wikis from 14 October (calendar).
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Upcoming: WMF search platform team office hour, Wednesday, October 13th, 2021 at 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 17:00-18:00 CEST. Etherpad, Google Meet. You can come and chat about the Wikidata & Commons Query Service.
LIVE Wikidata editing #57 - YouTube, Facebook, October 16 at 18:00 UTC
Modeling and Documenting Queer Voices and Topics on Wikidata, Panel on Metadata and Gender Diversity, Amber Billey, Clair A Kronk, John Samuel, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Sayward Schoonmaker, DCMI Virtual 2021, October 8, 2021, Slides
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata for beginners. Part 2 (in Italian) - YouTube
You can also sign up for a slot at the birthday presents lightning talks session at WikidataCon 2021 to present your gift for Wikidata birthday until October 16
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are now working on letting reviewers indicate if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
Fixed a bug where it was possible for two Properties to have the same label in a given language by undoing/reverting an edit (phab:T289473)
Fixed a confusing error message that was being shown when trying to save geoshape / tabular data that doesn’t exist (phab:T285758)
Removing some unnecessary entity link formatting in edit summaries and special pages to improve performance (phab:T292203)
Fixing an issue with invalid dates that the API accepts but should not (phab:T289417)
Migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists.
We’re celebrating the 9th birthday of Wikidata on October 29 during the WikidataCon 🎂 Did you know that you can participate in the celebration by preparing a birthday present or attending events? Here’s how you can get involved!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Scottish Accused Witches Project with Ewan McAndrew and Emma Carroll (University of Edinburgh). [25], Oct 19th.
Learn Wikidata is an online interactive course created by the Vanderbilt University thanks to a WikiCite grant and available in English, Spanish and Chinese. More information here.
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on the review part of the system. We are working on letting reviewers submit their decision if the mismatch is on Wikidata, the other database, both or neither.
In the previous week we migrated all Wikimedia wikis to use the new change dispatching system. This system is responsible for notifying the other wikis about edits made on Wikidata that affect their articles so the article is refreshed and edits are added to recent changes and watchlists. This week we monitored the new system and investigated and fixed a few issues that came up.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Toolhub is a catalogue to make it easier to find software tools that can be used for working on the Wikimedia projects. You can read more.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 October. It will be on all wikis from 21 October (calendar).
3–5% of editors may be blocked in the next few months. This is because of a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. It is called iCloud Private Relay. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new API for those who use a lot of information from the Wikimedia projects on other sites. It is a way to get big commercial users to pay for the data. There will soon be a copy of the Wikimedia Enterprise dataset. You can read more. You can also ask the team questions on Zoom on 22 October 15:00 UTC.
User:Bargioni/UseAsRef has now a 2.0 version, allowing to use as references not only external IDs but also some other properties (P1343, P973, P8214 etc.)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
QID ("Initialism of Q-identifier, a unique identifier for an item in Wikidata. [from 2012]") now has an entry in Wiktionary
The 3rd edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations (see announcement on wikimedia-l). Please submit your favorite tools by October 27th. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater now fully shipped to production. This will help the Query Service better deal with the amount of edits happening on Wikidata. (more information)
Mismatch Finder: Continuing work on the results page where mismatches are shown for review. We are focusing on showing all necessary information for a mismatch to make a good determination if it is a mismatch in Wikidata, the external source or neither.
Finishing the work on the new change dispatching system that improves how Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are notified about edits happening on Wikidata that affect them. Currently tying up some lose ends.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Coolest Tool Award 2021 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 27 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 October. It will be on all wikis from 28 October (calendar).
Future changes
Diff pages will have an improved copy and pasting experience. The changes will allow the text in the diff for before and after to be treated as separate columns and will remove any unwanted syntax. [26]
The version of the Liberation fonts used in SVG files will be upgraded. Only new thumbnails will be affected. Liberation Sans Narrow will not change. [27]
Documentation of the sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (linked from each session's Etherpad).
Wikidatapink pony session (a meetup where participants shared wishes and feature requests about Wikidata to the development team)
Continued the work on the first version of the Mismatch Finder. We are getting closer to the polishing phase now and will have something ready in the next weeks.
Lua access for Lexemes is now ready to test on English Beta Wiktionary.
Concluded work on the improved behind-the-scenes system for notifying Wikipedias and co about Wikidata edits that affect them. Nothing should have changed for you.
Started working on a new implementation of the search box to be ready for the upcoming skin changes the WMF is working on.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a limit on the amount of emails a user can send each day. This limit is now global instead of per-wiki. This change is to prevent abuse. [28]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 November. It will be on all wikis from 4 November (calendar).
Documentation of the WikidataCon 2021 sessions are currently ongoing. It may take a few weeks to publish all 80 hours of content but you can already watch some of them (from each session's Etherpad)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile IP editors are now able to receive warning notices indicating they have a talk page message on the mobile website (similar to the orange banners available on desktop). These notices will be displayed on every page outside of the main namespace and every time the user attempts to edit. The notice on desktop now has a slightly different colour. [29][30]
In the future, unregistered editors will be given an identity that is not their IP address. This is for legal reasons. A new user right will let editors who need to know the IPs of unregistered accounts to fight vandalism, spam, and harassment, see the IP. You can read the suggestions for how that identity could work and discuss on the talk page.
Plantilla:Infotaula persona, infobox for people on Catalan Wikipedia with extensive use of Wikidata, used 175000 times, with Bridge editing. Sample use at ca:Frits Zernike.
Mismatch Finder: Added various dialogs and help texts to make it easier to understand what reviewers need to do and what information they are seeing in the tool
Mismatch Finder: started polishing and bug fixing for release of the first version
Making the order of Lexeme's grammatical features consistent (phab:T232557)
Investigating how to share complex SPARQL queries in Wikidata Query Service via short URL (phab:T295560)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Most large file uploads errors that had messages like "stashfailed" or "DBQueryError" have now been fixed. An incident report is available.
Problems
Sometimes, edits made on iOS using the visual editor save groups of numbers as telephone number links, because of a feature in the operating system. This problem is under investigation. [32]
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [33]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 November. It will be on all wikis from 18 November (calendar).
This post about the question of the week is showing how questions can be answered over Wikidata. Also it gives some insights on how Google and Siri are using Wikidata.
A new openly accessible book on knowledge graphs has been published by prominent researchers in the field.
Working on displaying the grammatical features of Lexemes in a particular order in the UI (phab:T232557)
Mismatch Finder: continuing polishing before first release. Focusing on making API documentation available and adding a footer to the site
The ongoing work on MediaWiki skin improvements especially for Wikipedia will break the search box for Wikidata. We're working on addressing this. (phab:T275251)
Migrating a number of components to vue 3 to keep up with the rest of MediaWiki (phab:T294465)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Next LD4 Wikibase Working Hour. Thurs. 16 December 2021, 11AM-12PM Eastern, (time zone converter). "We will continue work developing our WBStack sandbox which seeks to explore how Wikibase could help track the usage of alternate labels for terms in vocabularies like LCSH"
LIVE Wikidata editing #64 - YouTube, Facebook, December 4 at 19:00 UTC
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on last remaining tickets for the first version. Added a footer to the site, improved documentation and added ability to delete a batch of mismatches.
Made good progress on migrating our on-wiki Vue apps to support the new Vue.createMwApp compatibility layer in MediaWiki core (phab:T294465)
Continued work on making it possible to define a custom ordering of grammatical features on Lexemes (phab:T232557)
More research and discussion on mul language code (phab:T285156)
Discussing with data re-users about their views on the ontology issue classification we worked on earlier this year to get their input (slides from Data Quality Days session)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 December. It will be on all wikis from 2 December (calendar).
"Knowledge Based Multilingual Language Model" Using the Wikidata to build the language models that not only memorize the factual knowledge but also learn useful logical patterns. (Liu et al, 2021)
Videos
Summary of Transbordados, the pre-WikidataCon conference organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil (in Brazilian Portuguese)
Tool of the week
Weaviate big graph (source) is a vectorised search engine which returns similar items in Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
MediaWiki 1.38-wmf.11 was scheduled to be deployed on some wikis last week. The deployment was delayed because of unexpected problems.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 December. It will be on all wikis from 9 December (calendar).
At all Wikipedias, a Mentor Dashboard is now available at Special:MentorDashboard. It allows registered mentors, who take care of newcomers' first steps, to monitor their assigned newcomers' activity. It is part of the Growth features. You can learn more about activating the mentor list on your wiki and about the mentor dashboard project.
The predecessor to the current MediaWiki Action API (which was created in 2008), action=ajax, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to the corresponding API module. [34]
An old ResourceLoader module, jquery.jStorage, which was deprecated in 2016, will be removed this week. Any scripts or bots using it will need to switch to mediawiki.storage instead. [35]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Lightning talks on WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Wikidata use for a site-specific archaeological case study (Dura-Europos, Syria), and round tripping Wikidata into Alma using Alma Refine. Agenda, Dec. 14th.
Lukas Schmelzeisen, Corina Dima, Steffen Staab: "Wikidated 1.0: An Evolving Knowledge Graph Dataset of Wikidata's Revision History", https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05003v1
"ARTchives: a Linked Open Data native catalogue of art historians’ archive" crowdsourcing curated information on notable art historians’ archives (including Wikidata) - paper, tool
embeds.js: This script shows embeds on external identifier statements such as YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, Spotify playlists, Genius lyrics, and more!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There are now default short aliases for the "Project:" namespace on most wikis. E.g. On Wikibooks wikis, [[WB:]] will go to the local language default for the [[Project:]] namespace. This change is intended to help the smaller communities have easy access to this feature. Additional local aliases can still be requested via the usual process. [36]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 December. It will be on all wikis from 16 December (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
The 500th Wikidata weekly summary is 2 issues away. We are putting together interesting things related to the number 500 to include in that issue. Do you know any Wikidata facts or queries or anything cool related to 500? Please add them to Wikidata:Status updates/Next#Welcome to the 500th Weekly Summary!
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
Due to the winter holidays, the development team is taking a break and no deployment is happening for Wikidata at the moment. Happy holidays, everyone :)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 10 January 2022.
Recent changes
Queries made by the DynamicPageList extension (<DynamicPageList>) are now only allowed to run for 10 seconds and error if they take longer. This is in response to multiple outages where long-running queries caused an outage on all wikis. [37]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The Wikimedia Cloud VPS hosts technical projects for the Wikimedia movement. Developers need to claim projects they use. This is because old and unused projects are removed once a year. Unclaimed projects can be shut down from February. [38]
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 GMT on Thursday 30th December 2021 (17:00 Berlin time). This month we will have a guest presentation by the team at The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute. They will present how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) in their projects with the help of Wikibase. All are welcome!
Wikidata. Lecture - master class in Russian is 16:07 GMT on Sunday 26th December 2021 (19:07 Moscow time) in Minsk Hackerspace. For those who are not familiar and want to know what it is.
Articles created by country of citizenship : a javascript notebook which looks at the distribution of articles created by a user by country of citizenship (P27). It uses Wikidata's API through wikibase-sdk library.
If you are using the Modern Vector skin on Wikidata then search might break for you near the end of January for a few days. To fix it you can temporarily switch back to the Vector skin. A proper fix is being worked on in phab:T275251.
Wikimedia Deutschland is running a survey to evaluate Wikibase Installation and Updating experience for users. Please answer a few questions so we can continue to identify areas of improvement for users. Survey links
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 4 at 19:00 CEST
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group.
Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour on January 13th at 18:00 Central Europe Time (17:00 UTC/GMT), in this Jitsi room. This edition will be an open discussion without a specific theme: you can bring 1-2 Phabricator tickets that you really care about, and we will look at them together and see how we can add relevant information and triage them.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Review Wikimedia Foundation’s Linked Open Data Strategy 2021 and community discussion. Agenda, January 11th. to local time!
Upcoming Search Platform Office Hours. Date: Wednesday, January 12th, 2022. Time: 16:00-17:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PST / 11:00-12:00 EST / 17:00-18:00 CET & WAT
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 12 at 19:00 CEST (exceptionally on Wednesday)
Introduction to the interwiki links between Wikidata and Wikipedia (in French) - YouTube
Exploring Wikipedia infobox from Wikidata (in French) - YouTube
WIkimedia CEE Online Meeting 2021
Implementing Wikidata in Educational Institutions — CEE Challenges and Opportunities - YouTube
Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory - YouTube
Wikidata automatization and integration with web resources - YouTube
Tool of the week
OneZoom "tree of life explorer" is an interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science using Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Celtic Knot Conference (dedicated to underserved languages on the Wikimedia project, with a strong focus on Wikidata and lexicographical data) will take place online in 2022. You can help the organizers with giving input on topics you'd like to see at the conference. Feel free to fill in the survey before January 17.
if you want to declare that you are available for merging duplicate articles in one or more given Wikipedias, please add your name to this page
if you want to find some user able to merge articles in a certain Wikipedia, you can see if there are already available users for that Wikipedia and contact them directly
New open positions at Wikimedia Deutschland (Wikidata/Wikibase teams)
New updater for the Wikidata Query Service to help it keep up with the large number of edits on Wikidata
Query Builder to make it easier for people to create SPARQL queries without having to know SPARQL
Item Quality Evaluator to make it easy to find the highest and lowest quality Items in a topic area
Constraints Violations Checker is a small command-line tool that gives constraint violation statistics for a set of Items to make it easier to find the Items that need more work
Curious Facts finds anomalies in the data in Wikidata and offers them up for review and amusement
Wikidata Map to see the distribution of Wikidata's Items across the world and the connections between them
Current Events to make it easy to see what's currently a hot topic in the world and being edited a lot on Wikidata
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A oauth_consumer variable has been added to the AbuseFilter to enable identifying changes made by specific tools. [39]
Gadgets are now able to directly include JSON pages. This means some gadgets can now be configured by administrators without needing the interface administrator permission, such as with the Geonotice gadget. [40]
Gadgets can now specify page actions on which they are available. For example, |actions=edit,history will load a gadget only while editing and on history pages. [41]
Gadgets can now be loaded on demand with the withgadget URL parameter. This can be used to replace an earlier snippet that typically looks like withJS or withCSS. [42]
Four special pages (and their API counterparts) now have a maximum database query execution time of 30 seconds. These special pages are: RecentChanges, Watchlist, Contributions, and Log. This change will help with site performance and stability. You can read more details about this change including some possible solutions if this affects your workflows. [46]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, January 19th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team present what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 18 at 19:00 CEST
LIVE Wikidata editing #67 - YouTube, Facebook, January 22 at 19:00 UTC
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using WikiEditor (also known as the 2010 wikitext editor), people will now see a warning if they link to disambiguation pages. If you click "Review link" in the warning, it will ask you to correct the link to a more specific term. You can read more information about this completed 2021 Community Wishlist item.
When asked to create a new page or talk page section, input fields can be "preloaded" with some text. This feature is now limited to wikitext pages. This is so users can't be tricked into making malicious edits. There is a discussion about if this feature should be re-enabled for some content types.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).
Events
Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 27th January 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Editing with OpenRefine live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, January 25 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Professor Pascal Martinolli speaking on tabletop role-playing game citations practices and Wikidata, January 25th.
LIVE Wikidata editing #68 - YouTube, Facebook, January 29 at 19:00 UTC
Implementing basic version of mul language code and deploying it to Test Wikidata (phab:T297393)
Preparing an event centered on reusing Wikidata's data
Mismatch Finder: Been in touch with people who can potentially provide the first mismatches to load into the new tool for the launch. Finalized the statistics part.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [48]
Events
You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
Talk to the Search Platform Team about anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service, Wikimedia Commons Query Service, etc.! February 2nd, 2022. Etherpad.
LIVE Wikidata editing #69 - YouTube, Facebook, February 5 at 19:00 UTC
Continuing work on adding the mul language code for labels, descriptions and aliases. (phab:T297393)
Enabled statement usage tracking for Cebuano, Armenian and Warai Warai to ensure fine-grained notifications about edits on Wikidata on those Wikipedias (phab:T296383, phab:T296382, phab:T296384)
Continuing work on fixing a bug where Wikidata changes do not get sent to Wikipedia and co for the first sitelink adding leading to missing information in the page_props table (phab:T233520)
Continuing work on making sure the Wikidata search box works with the new Vector skin improvements (phab:T296202)
Mismatch Finder: Debugging some issues with the first files we got with mismatches that we can load into the Mismatch Finder
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [49]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).
Future changes
A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.
The Data Reuse Days will bring together Wikidata editors and data reusers on March 14-24 - we're currently building the schedule. Join us and discover many cool projects!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andy Mabbett on the "Cite Q" template that uses data from Wikidata in Wikipedia citations and Crystal Clements on setting the framework for a future discussion on addressing ethical concerns surrounding representation of gender for living persons in Wikidata, February 8th. Agenda
Wikidata Query Service scaling: You can join 2 calls and provide feedback at the 2 WDQS scaling community meetings on Thursday, 17 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC, and Monday 21 Feb 2022 18:00 UTC. Full details here.
Live on Twitch and in French about Academic bibliographical data and Scholia by Vigneron and Jsamwrites, February 8 at 19:00 CET (UTC+1)
LIVE Wikidata editing #70 - YouTube, Facebook, February 12 at 19:00 UTC
Wikidata has 2,540,891 items for people with both date of birth and date of death. There are 9 redirects for every 100 such items. (source). 2000 people share dates of birth and death with another person.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Category counts are sometimes wrong. They will now be completely recounted at the beginning of every month. [50]
Problems
A code-change last week to fix a bug with Live Preview may have caused problems with some local gadgets and user-scripts. Any code with skin-specific behaviour for vector should be updated to also check for vector-2022. A code-snippet, global search, and example are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 February. It will be on all wikis from 10 February (calendar).
Krbot's constraint reports are now generally updated daily, after code optimizations and hardware upgrades.
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Wikidata ESR is a tool to visualize evolutions of universities and schools, such as creations, mergers, deletions and relations. Feedback and help to develop this project further is requested.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [51]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the "space" character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters' behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [52]
The Data Reuse Days will bring together Wikidata editors and data reusers on March 14-24 - we're currently building the schedule. Join us and discover many cool projects!
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th February 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Huda Khan and Astrid Usong on their Linked Data for Production 3 (LD4P3) grant work to use Wikidata in knowledge panels in Cornell’s library catalog Agenda - 2022-02-22 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter)
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikipedias, all new accounts now get the Growth features by default when creating an account. Communities are encouraged to update their help resources. Previously, only 80% of new accounts would get the Growth features. A few Wikipedias remain unaffected by this change. [54]
You can now prevent specific images that are used in a page from appearing in other locations, such as within PagePreviews or Search results. This is done with the markup class=notpageimage. For example, [[File:Example.png|class=notpageimage]]. [55]
There has been a change to the HTML of Special:Contributions, Special:MergeHistory, and History pages, to support the grouping of changes by date in the mobile skin. While unlikely, this may affect gadgets and user scripts. A list of all the HTML changes is on Phabricator.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 February. It will be on all wikis from 24 February (calendar).
Future changes
The software to play videos and audio files on pages will change soon on all wikis. The old player will be removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [56][57]
Toolforge's underlying operating system is being updated. If you maintain any tools there, there are two options for migrating your tools into the new system. There are details, deadlines, and instructions on Wikitech. [58]
Mismatch Finder, the tool that lets you review mismatches between the data in Wikidata and other databases, is now ready to be used for checking potential mismatches and uploading lists of new potential mismatches.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Mentors using the Growth Mentor dashboard will now see newcomers assigned to them who have made at least one edit, up to 200 edits. Previously, all newcomers assigned to the mentor were visible on the dashboard, even ones without any edit or ones who made hundred of edits. Mentors can still change these values using the filters on their dashboard. Also, the last choice of filters will now be saved. [60][61]
The user group oversight was renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. You may need to update any local references to the old name, e.g. gadgets, links to Special:Listusers, or uses of NUMBERINGROUP.
Problems
The recent change to the HTML of tracking changes pages caused some problems for screenreaders. This is being fixed. [62]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 March. It will be on all wikis from 3 March (calendar).
Future changes
Working with templates will become easier. Several improvements are planned for March 9 on most wikis and on March 16 on English Wikipedia. The improvements include: Bracket matching, syntax highlighting colors, finding and inserting templates, and related visual editor features.
If you are a template developer or an interface administrator, and you are intentionally overriding or using the default CSS styles of user feedback boxes (the classes: successbox, messagebox, errorbox, warningbox), please note that these classes and associated CSS will soon be removed from MediaWiki core. This is to prevent problems when the same class-names are also used on a wiki. Please let us know by commenting at phab:T300314 if you think you might be affected.
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3. Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
Closed request for permissions/Bot: IndoBot (Approved). Task/s: I would like to import all Indonesian schools, more than 100000. The data includes school type, location, and coordinates as well as external identifiers
LIVE Wikidata editing #74 - YouTube, Facebook, March 12th at 19:00 UTC
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour. Presentation and discussion: "Introduction to Linked Open Data Strategy with Lea Voget, Head, Product Management WMDE". Lea is not only the team lead of product, project and program managers at WMDE, she is also one of the main thinkers behind the Linked Open Data strategy. When: 11 March 2022, 11AM-12PM Eastern US (Time zone converter). Registration: Registration link
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Associate Librarian Stacy Allison-Cassin and her students on Wikidata in the classroom. Agenda
Creating a new item on Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Connecting Wikidata with OpenStreetMap (in Italian) - YouTube
Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons (in French) - YouTube: 1, 2, 3.
Tool of the week
Wikxhibit is a tool that allows anyone, even non-programmers, to create cool presentations of Wikidata, and other sources of data on the web, only using HTML and without any additional programming. Are you interested in creating presentations of Wikidata? We would like to understand your experience with Wikidata to better improve our tool. It would help if you can fill out our survey https://mit.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cvZKKlRu2S7C9Fk
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata dumps: Due to technical issues the JSON and RDF dumps for the week of March 1st couldn't be properly generated (phab:T300255#7746418). The situation is expected to get back to normal this week.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
There was a problem with some interface labels last week. It will be fixed this week. This change was part of ongoing work to simplify the support for skins which do not have active maintainers. [63]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 March. It will be on all wikis from 10 March (calendar).
Data Reuse Days, on March 14-24: you can select the sessions you'd like to join among the many presentations, workshops and discussions in the schedule. You can also look at a selection of sessions based on your areas of interest.
LIVE Wikidata editing #75 - YouTube, Facebook, March 19th at 19:00 UTC
Mismatch Finder: Discussing the next batches of potential mismatches with MusicBrainz data and some remaining Freebase data
Lexicographical data: Continuing work on the basic version of the new Special:NewLexeme page, focusing on putting in the base data about the new Lexeme
REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Wikipedia Android app it is now possible to change the toolbar at the bottom so the tools you use more often are easier to click on. The app now also has a focused reading mode. [64][65]
Problems
There was a problem with the collection of some page-view data from June 2021 to January 2022 on all wikis. This means the statistics are incomplete. To help calculate which projects and regions were most affected, relevant datasets are being retained for 30 extra days. You can read more on Meta-wiki.
There was a problem with the databases on March 10. All wikis were unreachable for logged-in users for 12 minutes. Logged-out users could read pages but could not edit or access uncached content then. [66]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 March. It will be on all wikis from 17 March (calendar).
Access to Special:RevisionDelete has been expanded to include users who have deletelogentry and deletedhistory rights through their group memberships. Before, only those with the deleterevision right could access this special page. [68]
On the Special:Undelete pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions. [69]
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the IP Masking implementation strategy and next steps. The announcement can be read here.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place as a hybrid event on 20-22 May 2022. The Hackathon will be held online and there are grants available to support local in-person meetups around the world. Grants can be requested until 20 March.
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
PodcastBot. Task/s: Upload new podcast episodes, extract: title, part of the series, has quality (explicit episode), full work available at (mp3), production code, apple podcast episode id, spotify episode ID. Regex extraction: talk show guest, recording date (from description)
AradglBot. Task/s: Create between 100,000 and 200,000 new lexemes in Aragonese language Q8765
Closed request for permissions/Bot: EnvlhBot 3 (approved). Task/s: add dictionaries IDs to French lexemes
Data Reuse Days, on March 14-24: you can select the sessions you'd like to join among the many presentations, workshops and discussions in the schedule. For a recap of the event so far:
a selection of sessions are recorded, you can find the videos here or below
speakers will progressively add their slides in this Commons category
Cartographier des données de Wikidata avec Umap (in French) - YouTube
Mapping Einstein Researchers on Wikidata (in Portuguese) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Linked People project let's you explore the family trees of all known people at Wikipedia/Wikidata.
Gene of the Day (gene-wordle) uses Wikidata for gene names and crafting an answer list by number of sitelinks.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There are Rapid Grants available for local meetups during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 from May 20-May 22. Apply to host a social for your local community. The deadline to apply is March 27, 2022.
The proposed config change to remove the changetags right from users – so that they can apply change tags to their own actions as they are made, but not change the tags of other actions after the fact anymore – has been deployed.
Lexicographical data: We're continuing with the work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We worked on saving a valid new Lexeme with the new page. We are now focusing on the suggesters for language and lexical category so editors can select the right Item for them.
Data Reuse Days: We ran sessions on how to use Wikidata's data programmatically and the best practices around it. Slides and videos are available already (see above).
REST API: Continuing coding on the basic version of the GET Item endpoint. We have the very initial version of the get item endpoint ready and are now adding more parameters to it.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
New code release schedule for this week
There will be four MediaWiki releases this week, instead of just one. This is an experiment which should lead to fewer problems and to faster feature updates. The releases will be on all wikis, at different times, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You can read more about this project.
The Jupyter notebooks tool PAWS has been updated to a new interface. [72]
Future changes
Interactive maps via Kartographer will soon work on wikis using the FlaggedRevisions extension. Please tell us which improvements you want to see in Kartographer. You can take this survey in simple English. [73]
The next Wikibase live session is 15:00 UTC on Thursday 31st March 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
ArtandFeminism 2022 editathon by Achiri Bitamsimli. Theme: Add Dagbani labels and descriptions of female lawyers in West Africa. Date: April 1st, 2022 - March 8th, 2022. Location: Tamale College of Education, Ghana. Time: 9:00am — 9:00pm UTC. Register.
LIVE Wikidata editing #77 - YouTube, Facebook, April 2nd at 18:00 UTC
Cultural Venues Datathon: April 25 - May 2, 2022. This online editing event is organized by the Canadian Association for the Performing Arts, LaCogency and many partners, with support from Wikimedia Foundation Alliances Fund. Guided editing sessions will be facilitated in English and in French.
The Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects, with a focus on Wikidata, will take place online and onsite on July 1-2, 2022.
Ongoing:
Wikimedia Indonesia's Datathon program under 2022 Wiki Women's Month started on March 18th 18:00 UTC+7 and will last until March 25th 23:59 UTC+7. 70+ users enrollled. Page.
Call for Mentors: Wiki Mentor Africa is a mentorship project for tool creators/contributors. Interested to become a mentor (experienced tool creators/contributors), please visit this page!
Wikidata now has over 1,600,000,000 edits! The milestone edit was made by Ruky Wunpini.
Lexicographical data: Working on the lookup for language and lexical category and displaying potential errors during Lexeme creation
Improved the API response of the wbsearchentities endpoint by adding the language to the labels and descriptions in the API response (phab:T104344)
Data Reuse Days: Second and final week - organized, attended and held a few sessions incl. bug triage hour and pink pony session
REST API: Continuing work on getting the the data of an Item, we almost have filtering of the data returned by the API and basic error handling is in place. Next up: not returning the data if the client already has the most recent data, and authentication
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a simple new Wikimedia Commons upload tool available for macOS users, Sunflower.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 March. It will be on all wikis from 31 March (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of regular database maintenance. It will be performed on 29 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 31 March at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [74][75]
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: APSbot 4: Task/s: Regularly create organizations from the Research Organization Registry (ROR - https://ror.org/) that are missing in Wikidata.
Highlighting linked data projects. "...Cornell University Library, Stanford Libraries, and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa are engaging in the grant-funded Linked Data for Production project. Broadly, the project uses linked data to show patrons information from outside sources (such as Wikidata) and build longer, more nuanced links between resources".
Videos
The Share-VDE project and its relationship with Wikidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Create a Wikidata page from scratch (in French) - YouTube
Clinical Trials, Wikidata and Systems Biology (in Portuguese) - YouTube
Lexicographical data: Continued work on the new Special:NewLexeme page and focused on displaying sensible error messages if an error occurs during Lexeme creation. We're also working on adding a dropdown for the language variant.
REST API: Continued work on conditional requests and authorization
Made use of the new fields added in the wbsearchentities API and added language information to the markup of entity searches that you see when editing a statement or searching with the little searchbox at the top of the page on Wikidata. Now these search results should make a bit more sense to people who use screen readers.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
For a few days last week, edits that were suggested to newcomers were not tagged in the Special:RecentChanges feed. This bug has been fixed. [76]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 April. It will be on all wikis from 7 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 7 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Future changes
Starting next week, Tech News' title will be translatable. When the newsletter is distributed, its title may not be Tech News: 2022-14 anymore. It may affect some filters that have been set up by some communities. [77]
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, April 20th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
April 22nd - 24th, from Wiki Mentor Africa, A three days workshop on Linking biodiversity data through wikidata using Webaps and jupyter notebooks to attend, register here
May 5th: Wikidata Bug Triage Hour, open discussion. Come with your favorite Phabricator task and we will improve its description together.
DigAMus goes Wikidata workshop: make digital projects in museums visible and findable. April 29, 3-5 p.m. TIB Open Science Lab. Register here.
Live Coding - PyORCIDAtor, integrating ORCID with Wikidata - YouTube
How to add location coordinates to Wikidata Items (in Dagbani) - YouTube
Bundestag + Wikidata = Open Parliament TV (in German) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Glitter another R package to write SPARQL queries and query Wikidata and other SPARQL endpoints. This package provides a domain specific language to write queries directly from R.
Conzept is a topic-exploration tool based on Wikidata and other information sources.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikidata MOOC (online course) has been developed by Wikimedia France, involving several French-speaking Wikidata editors. The first version of the course will start on April 26 (in French only - registration here)
Wikibase cloud update (April): the closed beta of Wikibase.cloud is planned to start in mid-April. If you want to apply for closed beta access, please register with this form.
Lexicographical data: Continued work on the new Special:NewLexeme page. We worked on displaying error messages and inferring the spelling variant from the language. We also looked into the non-JavaScript version of the page.
REST API: Worked on conditional requests (do not return data the client already has) and authorization.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new public status page at www.wikimediastatus.net. This site shows five automated high-level metrics where you can see the overall health and performance of our wikis' technical environment. It also contains manually-written updates for widespread incidents, which are written as quickly as the engineers are able to do so while also fixing the actual problem. The site is separated from our production infrastructure and hosted by an external service, so that it can be accessed even if the wikis are briefly unavailable. You can read more about this project.
On Wiktionary wikis, the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [78][79]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 April. It will be on all wikis from 14 April (calendar).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, April 20th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour: Learn about Wikibase system exploration, data model development, and the road ahead for Digital Scriptorium. When: Thurs. 21 April 2022, 3PM Eastern US (time zone converter). Where: Registration Link
WeDigBio Transcription workflow "...blogpost...showing how I go from finding the name of a collector when transcribing labels to adding them to Wikidata & then linking them to their collections via Bionomia."
Bird O'Clock! is a tool based on Wikidata and other data sources that shows pictures and numbers from actual people counting actual birds in the actual world!
Tiago's Coin Herbarium is a coin collection depicting different plant information displayed via Wikidata SPARQL queries.
Lexicographical data: Worked on inferring the spelling variant from the language's Item on the new Special:NewLexeme page and started building a little help box on the special page to explain what lex. data is.
REST API: Getting closer to having a first version of the REST API that returns Item data.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 April. It will be on all wikis from 21 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 19 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 21 April at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
On selected wikis, 50% of logged-in users will see the new table of contents. When scrolling up and down the page, the table of contents will stay in the same place on the screen. This is part of the Desktop Improvements project. [80]
Message boxes produced by MediaWiki code will no longer have these CSS classes: successbox, errorbox, warningbox. The styles for those classes and messagebox will be removed from MediaWiki core. This only affects wikis that use these classes in wikitext, or change their appearance within site-wide CSS. Please review any local usage and definitions for these classes you may have. This was previously announced in the 28 February issue of Tech News.
The next Wikibase live session is 15:00 UTC on Thursday 28th April 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Cultural Venues Datathon: April 25 - May 2, 2022. The aim of this online editing event is to increase the quantity and quality of performing arts building/venue items.
Daily guided editing sessions will be facilitated in English and in French between April 25 and April 29.
Wikidata Coffee Breaks From April 25 - April 29, 2022 to fill in missing information on Swiss Performing Arts Institutions and venues.
From May 4 to 18 there will be the International Museum Day - Wikidata competition. The aim is to improve data about museums in the countries and regions participating. Contributors from anywhere can take part.
The Wikimedia Hackathon will take place online on May 20–22, 2022. If you’re interested in presenting something around Wikidata and Wikibase during the hackathon, don’t wait too long to book a slot: Wikimedia Hackathon 2022/Schedule#The Wikidata and Wikibase Room.
Lexicographical data: Worked on showing the name of language variants in the language variant selector and added the new information box to help people get a better understanding of lex. data.
REST API: Finished the initial implementation of the endpoint for getting data for a full Item and discussed feedback, testing and roll-out plans.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On many wikis (group 1), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [85][86]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 April. It will be on all wikis from 28 April (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 26 April at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Some very old browsers and operating systems are no longer supported. Some things on the wikis might look weird or not work in very old browsers like Internet Explorer 9 or 10, Android 4, or Firefox 38 or older. [87]
Wikidata Bug Triage Hour on May 5th at 16:00 UTC, online. Open discussion - you can bring a Phabricator ticket that you care about or that needs to be improved.
May 3rd. Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: The call will include presentations on two projects using Wikidata to enhance discoverability of archival and museum collections. Sharon Garewal (JSTOR) will present “Adding Wikidata QIDs to JSTOR Images,” and Daniela Rovida and Jennifer Brcka (University of Notre Dame) will present “‘Archives At’: An opportunity to leverage MARC to create Linked Open Data.” [88]
Workshop "Wikidata, Zotero and Cita": tools to understand the construction of knowledge (in Spanish) - YouTube
Georeferencing cultural heritage on Wikidata - YouTube
Theory of Machine Learning on Open Data: The Wikidata Case by Goran S. Milovanovic - YouTube
Introduction to SPARQL (Wikidata Query Service (in Czech) - YouTube
Wikidata: A Knowledge Graph for the Earth Sciences - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:Nikki/LowercaseLabels.js - is a userscript that adds a button when editing labels to change the text to lowercase.
EqualStreetNames - is a tool that maps the inequality of name attributions.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
OpenRefine is running its two-yearly user survey! Do you use OpenRefine? Then fill in the survey to tell us how and why you use OpenRefine. Results and outcomes will inform future decisions about the tool.
The April update for the Wikidata Query Service scaling project is now available.
Lexicographical data: We are finishing up the information box that should help new users understand quickly what lexicographical data is. We also added the help text to encourage people to check if the Lexeme already exists before creating one.
REST API: We started working on the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On all remaining wikis (group 2), the software to play videos and audio files on pages has now changed. The old player has been removed. Some audio players will become wider after this change. The new player has been a beta feature for over four years. [89][90]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 May. It will be on all wikis from 5 May (calendar).
Future changes
The developers are working on talk pages in the Wikipedia app for iOS. You can give feedback. You can take the survey in English, German, Hebrew or Chinese.
Several CSS IDs related to MediaWiki interface messages will be removed. Technical editors should please review the list of IDs and links to their existing uses. These include #mw-anon-edit-warning, #mw-undelete-revision and 3 others.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, there was a problem with Wikidata's search autocomplete. This has now been fixed. [95]
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 20 minutes, for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a problem with a database change. [96]
The Vector (2022) skin will be set as the default on several more wikis, including Arabic and Catalan Wikipedias. Logged-in users will be able to switch back to the old Vector (2010). See the latest update about Vector (2022).
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place on 17 May. The following meetings are currently planned for: 7 June, 21 June, 5 July, 19 July.
The Wikimedia Hackathon will take place online on May 20–22, 2022. If you’re interested in presenting something around Wikidata and Wikibase during the hackathon, don’t wait too long to book a slot: Wikimedia Hackathon 2022/Schedule.
MapComplete is an OpenStreetMap viewer and editor that searches Wikidata for species - which means that it is super-easy to link the Wikidata item to a tree one sees!
REST API: We are continuing to implement the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item (phab:T305988, phab:T307087, phab:T307088)
Lexicographical data: We are finishing the version of the page for browsers without JavaScript support (phab:T298160). We started working on the feature to pre-fill the input fields by URL parameter (phab:T298154). And we started working on better suggestions for lexical categories so commonly-used ones can more easily be added to avoid mistakes (phab:T298150).
We fixed an issue with recently added new language codes not being usable for Lexemes and not being sorted correctly on Special:NewItem (phab:T277836).
The Wikimedia Hackathon will take place online on May 20–22, 2022. Are you interested in presenting something around Wikidata and Wikibase during the hackathon? Book a slot in the Wikidata+Wikibase room: Wikimedia Hackathon 2022/Schedule.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 17, 2022: Anson Parker and Lucy Carr-Jones (University of Virigina Claude Moore Health Sciences Library) will be talking about their Open Data Dashboard for analyzing University of Virginia Health publications using EuropePMC publication data as well as work to group publications based on institutional departments in Wikidata and how much of their content is "open." Agenda
LIVE Wikidata editing #80 - YouTube, Facebook, May 21 at 18:00 UTC
REST API: We continued implementing the REST routes to get all statements of an Item and retrieve a single statement from an Item (phab:T305988, phab:T307087, phab:T307088)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons. [99]
6 and 8 June: Scholia hackathon with focus on software-related visualizations and curation workflows
29 July 2022: The submission deadline for the Wikidata Workshop 2022 that will be co-located with the 21st International Conference on Semantic Web (ISWC 2022).
Interrogating linked open data and Wikidata with SPARQL Lorenzo Losa - YouTube
Tool of the week
LOD4Culture is a web application for exploring world-wide cultural heritage.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
UNLOCK, a Wikimedia Deutschland program, is looking for your project ideas. These could be the development of tools building on top of Wikidata's data, of applications for social and public good or related to civic tech. Apply until May 29th, 2022!
Wikibase REST API: Initial implementation of a route providing all statements of an item (phab:T305988), an a route to retrieve a single statement (phab:T307087) completed.
First batch of WBstack.com accounts successfully migrated to Wikibase.cloud. You can keep track of our progress on this phabricator ticket phab:T303852.
Lexicographical data: We updated the input placeholders on the new version of the NewLexeme special page (T302877, T307443). We finished the feature to prefill the inputs from URL parameters if present (T298154) and to suggest common lexical category items (T298150). We are working on some accessibility improvements (T303806, T290733, T305359) and improving validation / error messages (T305854).
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. [100]
The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren't able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all. [102]
Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation. [103]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).
Future changes
Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers. [104]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 31, 2022: Felicia Smith, Nicole Coleman, and Akosua Kissi on the Know Systemic Racism Project Agenda
Want to know more about Abstract Wikipedia & Wikifunctions? You can now subscribe to the weekly newsletter and get a friendly reminder every time a new issue is published!
Radioactivity map: Mind map about radioactive radiation built by importing from Wikidata with InfoRapid KnowledgeBase Builder
Wikibase REST API: Expanding statement reading routes (a single statement specified by ID (phab:T307087), all statements of an item (phab:T305988), a single statement for a specific item (phab:T307088))
Fetch revision metadata and entity data separately in all use cases (phab:T307915, decision)
Update installation instructions in WikibaseLexeme.git readme file (phab:T306008)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [105]
The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [106][107]
The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit. [108]
A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named "=". It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates. [109]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).
Lexicographical data: We finished work on input validation and displaying errors for faulty input (phab:T305854) and are continuing work on accessibility improvements such as screen reader support and keyboard navigation (phab:T290733, phab:T30535).
REST API: We finished implementation of conditional statement requests (phab:T307031, phab:T307032) and published the OpenAPI specification document (still subject to change as the API develops). We started working on the write part of the API with adding statements to an Item (phab:T306667).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call June 14, 2022: Will Kent (Wikidata Program Manager at Wiki Education) and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Wikimedia Foundation Trustee; Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University; co-founder of Wiki Women in Red) will present on Leveraging Wikidata for Wikipedia – running a multi-language wiki project and the role of Wikidata in improving Wikipedia's content gender gap. Agenda
ExtraInterwiki. Some language links will never show up in your favorite Wikipedia, those who don’t have a corresponding article in this Wikipedia. This new tool aims to give them more visibility by searching topics closed to the one on an article with no article on your wiki.
Fixed a bug where Item IDs where shown instead of the label after selecting an Item in an Item selector (phab:T306214)
Lexicographical data: finished accessibility improvement for the new Special:New Lexeme page (phab:T290733), improving error messages for the new page (phab:T310134) and worked on a new search profile to make selecting languages easier (phab:T307869)
REST API: continued work on creating statements (phab:T306667)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [113]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Syriac Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [114]
The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [115][116]
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.
Future changes
By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities' needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.
Next installment of the LD4 Wikibase Working Hour: Featuring speaker Barbara Fischer, Liaison Counsel at the German National Library’s Agency for Standardization (DNB). On behalf of the DNB, Fischer initiated the WikiLibrary Manifesto. Fischer works to increase the quality of metadata through Authority Control to foster retrieval and linked data. Where: Zoom (Registration link). When: 30 June 2022, 11AM-12PM Eastern US (Time zone converter)
Wikidata:Wiki Mentor Africa 3rd edition - Creating tools on Wikimedia Toolforge using Python and Flask. Friday 24th June and Sunday 26th June 2022 - 16:00 - 17:00 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikipedia App for Android now has an option for editing the whole page at once, located in the overflow menu (three-dots menu ). [117]
Some recent database changes may affect queries using the Quarry tool. Queries for site_stats at English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata will need to be updated. Read more.
A new user_global_editcount variable can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users. [118]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).
Users of non-responsive skins (e.g. MonoBook or Vector) on mobile devices may notice a slight change in the default zoom level. This is intended to optimize zooming and ensure all interface elements are present on the page (for example the table of contents on Vector 2022). In the unlikely event this causes any problems with how you use the site, we'd love to understand better, please ping Jon (WMF) to any on-wiki conversations. [119]
Parsoid's HTML output will soon stop annotating file links with different typeof attribute values, and instead use mw:File for all types. Tool authors should adjust any code that expects: mw:Image, mw:Audio, or mw:Video. [120]
The next Wikibase live session is 15:00 UTC on Thursday 30th June 2022 (17:00 Berlin time). What are you working on around Wikibase? You're welcome to come and share your project with the community.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call June 28, 2022: Andrew McAllister will introduce us to Scribe, an app that provides keyboards for second-language learners, and its use of Wikidata. This presentation should appeal to anyone who has worked on or is interested in learning more about the applications of lexicographical data in Wikidata as well as anyone who has an interest in language, open information, data and programming. Agenda
IsisCB Explore - is a research tool for the history of science whose books and subjects use imagery from Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template Item documentation now includes a query to the corresponding lexemes. This is an attempt to make navigation between lexemes and items easier. For the record, Item documentation is available in the header of the talk page for each item.
Lexicographical data: We are wrapping up the coding on the new Special:NewLexeme page. Testing and rolll-out will follow soon. We are still working on making it easier to find languages in the language selector on the Special:NewLexeme page. (phab:T307869)
REST API: We are continuing to code on the ability to create statements on an Item (phab:T306667)
Investigating an issue with labels not being shown after merges (phab:T309445)
Preparation for upcoming work: We are planning the next work on the Mismatch Finder to address feedback we have received so far as well as EntitySchemas to make them more integrated with other areas of Wikidata.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 June. It will be on all wikis from 30 June (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 28 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [121]
Some global and cross-wiki services will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 June at 06:00 UTC. This will impact ContentTranslation, Echo, StructuredDiscussions, Growth experiments and a few more services. [122]
Users will be able to sort columns within sortable tables in the mobile skin. [123]
Future meetings
The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place tomorrow (28 June). The following meetings will take place on 12 July and 26 July.
Latest comment: 2 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ListedBuildingsUKBot. Task/s: Add wikidata site links to appropriate wiki commons category pages for listed buildings with matching ID numbers. I've identified about 1000 entities that can be updated. e.g. [124] should have a wiki commons link to [125] since they both refer to [126].
Job openings in the software development team at Wikimedia Deutschland
Junior Product Manager Wikidata - "In this role you will be part of a cross-functional team, and be the product manager of product initiatives for Wikidata, the largest knowledge base of free and open data in the world."
Product Manager Wikibase Suite - In this role "you will be part of an interdisciplinary team and the product team, and work closely with a broad variety of stakeholders in the Wikibase Ecosystem."
We are continuing to work on the new search profile for languages to make setting the language of a new Lexeme easier (phab:T307869)
REST API: We are putting finishing touches on the first version of the API route to add statements to an Item. It is still lacking support for automated edit summaries.
We are working on word-level diffs to make it easier to see what changed in an edit (phab:T303317)
We are investigating the issue of labels not being shown after some merges (phab:T309445)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 July. It will be on all wikis from 7 July (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 5 July at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 7 July at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
This change only affects pages in the main namespace in Wikisource. The Javascript config variable proofreadpage_source_href will be removed from mw.config and be replaced with the variable prpSourceIndexPage. [127]
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call July 12, 2022: Houcemeddine Turki will speak on "Enriching and Validating Wikidata from Large Bibliographic Databases." This call will be part of the 2022 LD4 Conference on Linked Data, “Linking Global Knowledge.” While you can attend the call directly via the links below without registering for the conference, we encourage everyone to check out the full conference program and all the excellent sessions on Sched at Agenda
Due to summer vacations and our current workloads the response times from the Wikidata communications team (Léa and Mohammed) to requests and queries may be delayed. We will resume full capacity by October.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the page title is now displayed above the tabs such as Discussion, Read, Edit, View history, or More. Learn more. [128]
The Anti-Harassment Tools team recently deployed the IP Info Feature as a Beta Feature at all wikis. This feature allows abuse fighters to access information about IP addresses. Please check our update on how to find and use the tool. Please share your feedback using a link you will be given within the tool itself.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 12 July at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries Wikidata Working Hour July 18, 2022: Working with diverse children's book metadata. The second Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover reconciliation in OpenRefine, so we can identify which authors from our spreadsheet of children's book metadata already exist and/or need to be created in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. Event page
Placing a scientific article on Wikidata (in Portuguese) - YouTube
Teaching Wikidata Editing Practices (in Chinese) - YouTube
Threads
OpenSexism has created the Wednesday Index: each wednesday, it show gender diversity in Wikipedia articles. Gender diversity is computed using a SPARQL query.
Fixed an issue where the grammatical form of a Lexeme was rendered as `[object Object]` (phab:T239208) This also solves similar issues in other places.
REST API: Continued working on the API route to replace or remove a statement of an Item
We are making Wikibase resolve redirects when showing Item labels and descriptions in a lot more places; notably, this includes the wbsearchentities API. (phab:T312223)
Mismatch Finder: We are discussing options for how to improve its handling of dates, specifically calendar model and precision.
EntitySchemas: We are trying to figure out how to best technically go about implementing some of the most-needed features for version 2.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The feature on mobile web for Nearby Pages was missing last week. It will be fixed this week. [130]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 July. It will be on all wikis from 21 July (calendar).
BboberBot. Task/s: The "robot" will browse the latest VIAF Dump, select the lines with a Idref (P269) and a Qitem, and add a P269 when it doesn't already exist in Wikidata.
ADSBot English Paper. Task/s: Importing scholarly articles from ADS database to Wikidata, by creating Wikidata Item of a scholarly article (optionally author items) and adding statements and statements-related properties to the item. Part of Outreachy Round 24.
ADSBot English Statement. Task/s: Adding missing statements and statement-related properties to existing scholarly articles on Wikidata from the ADS database. Part of Outreachy Round 24.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, July 27th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
[Small wiki toolkits] [Upcoming bots & scripts workshop. "How to maintain bots" is coming up on Friday, July 29th, 16:00 UTC
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call July 26, 2022: Clair Kronk, Crystal Clements, and Alex Jung will be providing an update to Wikidata/gender discussions from the February 8 call with a focus on pronouns. Clair will introduce us to LGBTdb, a Wikibase instance created for and by LGBTQIA+ people from which we draw insight in Wikidata-related discussions. We also hope to discuss current pain points and share action items for future collaboration. Input from community members who are familiar with lexicographical data would be greatly appreciated. Agenda
Teaching Wikidata Editing Practices II (in Chinese) - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:Magnus Manske/referee.js - is a userscript that automatically checks external IDs and URLs of a Wikidata item as potential references, and adds them with a single click.
Lexicographical data: We went over all the feedback we received for teh testing of the new Special:NewLexeme page and started addressing it and fixing the uncovered issues. One issue already fixed is a bug that prevented it from working on mobile view. (phab:T313116)
Mismatch Finder: investigated how we can make it work for mismatches in qualifiers instead of the main statement (phab:T313467)
REST API: Continued working on making it possible to replace and remove a statement of an Item
We enabled the profile parameter to the wbsearchentities API on Test Wikidata (phab:T307869)
We continued making Wikibase resolve redirects when showing Item labels and descriptions in more places (phab:T312223)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, some wikis were in read-only mode for a few minutes because of an emergency switch of their main database (targeted wikis). [132]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
The external link icon will change slightly in the skins Vector legacy and Vector 2022. The new icon uses simpler shapes to be more recognizable on low-fidelity screens. [133]
Administrators will now see buttons on user pages for "Change block" and "Unblock user" instead of just "Block user" if the user is already blocked. [134]
Wikidata Birthday is taking place in October 2022, and together we are celebrating 10 amazing years of Wikidata with decentralized community events! Discover more Wikidata:Tenth Birthday -- organize an event and get funding
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).
This week, three meetings about Vector (2022) with live interpretation will take place. On Tuesday, interpretation in Russian will be provided. On Thursday, meetings for Arabic and Spanish speakers will take place. See how to join.
Wikimania 2022, August 11 to 14, online event. The Hackathon will take place August 12-14. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call August 9, 2022: Pieter Vander Vennet on MapComplete, a thematic OpenStreetMap viewer and editor which uses species, language, and image data from Wikidata. Agenda.
The Wikimania Hackathon starts next Friday, August 16-22! There are still lots of spots in the schedule to add your Wikidata related sessions or project ideas (anyone can present a session)
Toolhub is a catalog of 1500+ tools used every day in a wide variety of workflows across many Wiki projects. We are currently improving the search functionality and need your input – whether you are already familiar with Toolhub or not. Please take 5-10 minutes to leave feedback.
First online meet-up fully organized by volunteers of the Indonesian Wikidata Community has been held on 30th July where we edited items on Indonesian ethnic groups.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 9 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 11 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour August 15, 2022: Fourth session of our summer/fall project working with diverse children's book metadata. We'll be covering manually creating publisher items: showing how to create items, add statements to items, add references, and use gadgets. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
Ongoing:
Toolhub is a catalog of 1500+ tools used every day in a wide variety of workflows across many Wiki projects. We are currently improving the search functionality and need your input – whether you are already familiar with Toolhub or not. Please take 5-10 minutes to leave feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia community decided to block IP editing from October 2021 to April 2022. The Wikimedia Foundation's Product Analytics team tracked the impact of this change. An impact report is now available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 August. It will be on all wikis from 18 August (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 16 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 18 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
List of created Wikidata items - a tool which combines Xtools pages created API with Wikidata API to get the list of items created by a user with their label.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two problems with Kartographer maps have been fixed. Maps are no longer shown as empty when a geoline was created via VisualEditor. Geolines consisting of points with QIDs (e.g., subway lines) are no longer shown with pushpins. [139][140]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 August. It will be on all wikis from 25 August (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The colours of links and visited links will change. This is to make the difference between links and other text more clear. [141]
The latest round of Outreachy internships wrapped up on 26 August. Two interns worked on improving author-name data; their bots have made over 340,000 edits. Their project description, documentation, blog posts and code are available.
The August 2022 summary for the Wikidata Query Service backend update is out!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
In recent months, there have been inaccurate numbers shown for various Special:Statistics at Commons, Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. This has now been fixed. [143]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 30 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Future changes
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents by building the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy and safe for users to make reports. You can leave comments on the talk page, by answering the questions provided. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, join a PIRS interview to share your experience. To sign up please emailMadalina Ana.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call September 6, 2022: Dominic Byrd-McDevitt will talk about the Digital Public Library's Wikimedia program, an effort to provide national leadership around access and discoverability of digital collections by leveraging Wikipedia and its sister projects. 2 years ago, DPLA launched a digital asset pipeline to enable participating institutions in the DPLA network to share their collections with Wikimedia Commons. DPLA is continuing to innovate by taking advantage of Wikidata entities and Structured Data on Commons to continually synchronize data and improve discoverability. We'll discuss issues around large datasets, aggregation, reconciliation, and other challenges DPLA has faced. Agenda
We are continuing to work on the PATCH endpoint to make it possible to edit existing statements (phab:T306934)
We started the security review process for one of the libraries we are using. Until that is finished this part of the REST API can unfortunately not be tested on beta Wikidata. (phab:T316523)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 6 September at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar's row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of #p-namespaces should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages, the new id for this row. Examples are available. [144][145]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour September 12, 2022: Sixth session of our summer/fall project working with diverse children's book metadata. We'll be creating items for books (works and editions) in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Wikidata Working Hour Event page
REST API: Continued work on the endpoint for changing a statement (phab:T306934)
Lexicographical data: Made sure that the new Lexeme creation page also is shown in older browsers (phab:T311157), which was one of the last remaining issues before we can switch out the existing page (phab:T307866)
Continued work on enabling sitelinks for redirects under certain conditions (phab:T278962)
Spend a few days with people from Wikimedia Indonesia to discuss our partnership
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The search servers have been upgraded to a new major version. If you notice any issues with searching, please report them on Phabricator. [146]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).
Dual script support for Punjabi Wikidata labels and descriptions in Gurmukhi (pa) and Shahmukhi (pnb), taking a conservative approach (only making "obvious" transliterations).
Addition of labels and descriptions entirely consistent of information which can be inferred from other language labels (again, only for "obvious" cases).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call September 20, 2022: Michael Jones (National Library of Wales) on his work using machine learning, Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), and Wikidata with historical newspaper collections. Agenda
The Climate Knowledge Hunt Hackathon: IPCC reports → Wikidata event on September 24. Registration
Finished the endpoint for editing statements (phab:T306934)
Working on automated edit summaries (phab:T312811)
Making small modifications to the response format for statements (phab:T317866)
Lexicographical data:
Special:NewLexemeAlpha now uses the new search profile for languages, which makes it easier to select a language Item for the language of the new Lexeme (phab:T312853)
Finished the work on making sure that the example Lexeme falls back to other locally defined examples for languages other than English instead of the pre-set example Lexeme (phab:T313599)
Working on making sure that only *-x-Q123, not *-x-q123, can be used as a Lexeme language code (phab:T317863)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Two database fields in the templatelinks table are now being dropped: tl_namespace and tl_title. Any queries that rely on these fields need to be changed to use the new normalization field called tl_target_id. See T299417 for more information. This is part of normalization of links tables. [148][149]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 September. It will be on all wikis from 22 September (calendar).
In Kartographer maps, you can use icons on markers for common points of interest. On Tuesday, the previous icon set will be updated to version maki 7.2. That means, around 100 new icons will be available. Additionally, all existing icons were updated for clarity and to make them work better in international contexts. [150][151]
Future changes
In a group discussion at Wikimania, more than 30 people talked about how to make content partnership software in the Wikimedia movement more sustainable. What kind of support is acceptable for volunteer developers? Read the summary and leave your feedback.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour September 30, 2022: the seventh Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be a review session of creating contributor and publisher items in Wikidata. The primary goal of this session is to generate as many contributor and publisher items as we can in advance of the two following sessions which have to do with batch editing -- we want enough to make a good batch! We will review how to add items, but then reserve the bulk of the session for open editing, kind of like a mini-editathon! Naturally, participants can ask questions and share thoughts at any point during the editing! You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in the project series will be recorded. Links will be added when available. Event page
User:Bovlb/notability.js is a userscript that adds a small notability indicator to the top right of an item showing how well the item satisfies the three notability criteria. Left to right, the three columns indicate sitelinks, identifiers and references, and structural need.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Parsoid clients should be updated to allow for space-separated multi-values in the rel attribute of links. Further details are in T315209.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 September. It will be on all wikis from 29 September (calendar).
Visual diffs will become available to all users, except at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias. [152]
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. [153][154]
In the Module namespace, pages ending with .json will be treated as JSON, just like they already are in the User and MediaWiki namespaces. [155]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Kartographer maps can now show geopoints from Wikidata, via QID or SPARQL query. Previously, this was only possible for geoshapes and geolines. [156][157]
The Coolest Tool Award 2022 is looking for nominations. You can recommend tools until 12 October.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 October. It will be on all wikis from 6 October (calendar).
Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. (Last week's release was delayed) [158][159]
The scribunto-console API module will require a CSRF token. This module is documented as internal and use of it is not supported. [5]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikimedia projects. Learn more.
October 4, 2022: Lana Soglasnova and Roman Tashlitskyy will talk about their preliminary work in creating and editing items for Slavic people and some of the complications involved in this work, especially around transliterating names in various languages. Agenda
Wikibase Working Hour! 25 October 2022, 2pm Eastern (Time zone converter) Amy Ruskin of Northeastern University Library, will speak on the topic of Wikidata vs. custom Wikibases: Community history case studies, Boston’s Chinatown. The Boston Research Center (BRC) is a digital community history and archives lab based in the Northeastern University Library. One of our current projects involves taking an inventory of historical materials related to Boston’s Chinatown, and we have been using Wikibase to store multilingual data about the linked collections, organizations, and people. In this presentation, we will discuss our experience of getting started with a custom Wikibase and give an overview of our progress so far on the Chinatown Collections project. Amy Ruskin is the Data Engineer in the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She has a Master's degree in Information Studies from McGill University and a background in computer science and statistics. Registration link
Wikidata Office Hour GLAM-Hack − online meet-up about the "library world" with Wikidata. October 5th, 12.00 UTC (online via Zoom)
Ongoing
Wikimedia Österreich, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland, started the DACH Culture Contest as a Börthday present for Wikidata 10th anniversary! It features two categories: "libraries in Austria, Germany and Switzerland" and "Culture in Austria, Germany and Switzerland". So if you would like to improve data about libraries, books, music, art, video games, cinema etc as a börthday treat, join us and get the chance to win some nice prizes! The contest will last until October 16, 2022.
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations. Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 October. It will be on all wikis from 13 October (calendar).
On some wikis, Kartographer maps in full size view will be able to display nearby articles. After a feedback period, more wikis will follow. [160][161]
Wikidata Tenth Birthday Speaker Series Week 1 (n part one we learn how Wikidata is (or is not) integrated into Wikipedia, how it helps an enormous cultural institution like the Smithsonian achieve its goals)
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award is looking for nominations. Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022. The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
MUL language code: fixed the order of languages shown in the termbox on desktop, especially when mul is used (phab:T311617)
Lexicographical data:
Made Special:NewLexemeAlpha use the same font as the rest of the wiki (phab:T313166) – this should be the last blocker for replacing the old special page
Disallowed *-x-qid with lowercase Q as Lexeme language codes in favor of *-x-Qid (phab:T317863)
REST API: worked on handling conditional HTTP request headers
Changed the unexpectedUnconnectedPage page prop so that Special:UnconnectedPages can show the latest pages first, which should finally resolve this old security task in production (phab:T300770)
Cleaned up the Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme ontology files (phab:T314360)
Added a few more globes for geocoordinates (phab:T314611) - Thanks, Mike!
Task/s: I'm using Openrefine to edit items related to Wikidata:Wikiproject_Lieder, beginning by adding the new subclass lyrico-musical work (Q114586269) to the actual lieder in WD. I hope to gain some experience before going with further edits.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 18th: session where community members can share their favorite Wikidata gadgets, user scripts, or SPARQL queries Agenda
Learn Wikidata and celebrate #WikidataBirthday in Sydney! (An introduction to wikidata: how worlds of wikimedia link). Saturday 22 October from 11am to 2pm. Sign up.
The Welsh Government's new mapping platform Data Map Wales (for publishing public geo data) now has an optional base layer entirely in Welsh. This is largely based on OSM data with additional place names from Wikidata.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
A bug that caused problems in loading article thumbnails in Special:Search has been fixed. Further details are in T320406.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 October. It will be on all wikis from 20 October (calendar).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour October 24, 2022: ninth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be batch loading data using QuickStatements to create items for works and editions in Wikidata. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
The Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online. It included a session about the role of the Wikimedia ecosystem in linking biodiversity data, which featured six talks, all of which with strong Wikidata components. Slides and/ or video recordings are already available for some (more to follow):
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There have been some minor visual fixes in Special:Search, regarding audio player alignment and image placeholder height. Further details are in T319230.
On Wikipedias, a new preference has been added to hide article thumbnails in Special:Search. Full details are in T320337.
Problems
Last week, three wikis (French Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia) had read-only access for 25 minutes. This was caused by a hardware problem. [166]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 October. It will be on all wikis from 27 October (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 25 October at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 27 October at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Assamese Wikipedia, Bashkir Wikipedia, Balinese Wikipedia, Bavarian Wikipedia, Samogitian Wikipedia, Bikol Central Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Belarusian (Taraškievica) Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Bhojpuri Wikipedia, Bislama Wikipedia, Banjar Wikipedia, Bambara Wikipedia, Bishnupriya Wikipedia, Breton Wikipedia, Bosnian Wikipedia, Buginese Wikipedia, Buryat Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [167]
Pages with titles that start with a lower-case letter according to Unicode 11 will be renamed or deleted. There is a list of affected pages at m:Unicode 11 case map migration. More information can be found at T292552.
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default across the smallest Wikipedias. Learn more.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 1, 2022: Egon Willighagen (d:User:Egonw) on SARS-CoV-2 queries, a a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to d:Wikidata:Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda.
Some additional materials have been made available from the Wikimedia session at the Biodiversity Information Standards annual conference (TDWG 2022) that took place from 17-21 October in Sofia, Bulgaria, and online:
sparklis (source) : query builder in natural language that allows people to explore and query SPARQL endpoints with all the power of SPARQL and without any knowledge of SPARQL, nor of the endpoint vocabulary.
✨ Other Noteworthy Stuff
Word Finder is a tool based on Wikidata Lexemes that solves anagrams and find missing letters in crosswords.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
When using keyboard navigation on a Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible. [172]
In Special:RecentChanges, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for "⧼rcfilters-filter-newuserlogactions-label⧽". [173]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Wikidata Working Hour November 7, 2022: tenth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. All sessions in our project series will be recorded for those who cannot attend. Links will be added to the event page when available. Event page
Wikidata and Wikibase office hour, taking place online on November 9th at 17:00 UTC (more details here)
Raising an Artist Profile with Wikidata: Thursday November 10, 2022 at 20:00 UTC (Session A) and 23:00 UTC (Session B). This free, step-by-step Wikidata workshop will focus mainly on Indigenous artists. Participants may choose to attend either Session A or Session B: both will cover the exact same material.
Wikidata editathon in Swedish with focus on climate politics and COP27, online and in Stockholm, 11 November 13.00-18.00 UTC
A Hands-On Introduction to Wikidata: Thursday December 1, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. By the end of this session, you will be able to edit Wikidata records about the cultural venues that matter most to you.
Lexicographical data: Replaced the old Special:NewLexeme page with the new one (phab:T307866) - a few remaining issues will still be fixed
Vue 3: Almost finished the Vue 3 migration in Wikibase and WikibaseLexeme (phab:T321595 and (phab:T304534) - this is needed for finalizing the migration in MediaWiki overall
Mismatch Finder: Worked on improving the handling of dates (phab:T288511)
Search: Working with the WMF on making the new Vue-based Vector search understand Wikidata (phab:T316093)), especially regarding “load more” behavior
REST API:
Continued improving error reporting for PATCH routes (phab:T320358)
Ensuring that the API correctly marks bot edits as bot edits and treats them as such in various other places
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
An updated version of the Event Registration tool is now available for testing at testwiki and test2wiki. The tool provides features for event organizers and participants. Your feedback is welcome at our project talkpage. More information about the project is available. [178]
Problems
Twice last week, for about 45 minutes, some files and thumbnails failed to load and uploads failed, mostly for logged-in users. The cause is being investigated and an incident report will be available soon.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 15, 2022: We will be discussing the first Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour series, which ran from July to early November of this year. We will offer visualizations based on our data, listen to some of our volunteers talk about their experience helping to build the series, and discuss the results of our participant survey. We want to hear your questions and suggestions for future series! Agenda
Enrichissement des données sur la danse: Wednesday 16 November at 6:30 pm UTC (Session A) and Thursday 17 November at 6:30 pm UTC (Session B). Join the Regroupement québécois de la danse (RQD) and the Linked Digital Future Initiative (LDFI) for two dynamic sessions focusing on dance data. Session A will focus on artists, while Session B will focus on organizations and dance companies. Note: These sessions are offered in French only.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
At Wikidata, an interwiki link can now point to a redirect page if certain conditions are met. This new feature is called sitelinks to redirects. It is needed when one wiki uses one page to cover multiple concepts but another wiki uses more pages to cover the same concepts. Your feedback on the talkpage of the new proposed guideline is welcome. [179]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 November. It will be on all wikis from 17 November (calendar).
There will be a new link to directly "Edit template data" on Template pages. [181]
Future changes
Wikis where mobile DiscussionTools are enabled (these ones) will soon use full CSS styling to display any templates that are placed at the top of talk pages. To adapt these “talk page boxes” for narrow mobile devices you can use media queries, such as in this example. [182]
Wiki <3 Data - How to use Wikidata for data visualization. Join us on Monday 28 Nov. from 13:15 - 17:00 at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland or online! - Hosted by Visual Communication Design programme at Aalto Arts, workshop by Yamen Bousrih.
Next Wikidata Bug Triage Hour about Entity Schemas and other topics, on December 6th at 17:00 on Jitsi
Template:Quickquery can be used to quickly write and link SPARQL queries on the Wikidata wiki
Development
REST API: continuing work on adjusting JSON request and response format (phab:T321459)
Lexicographical data:
Added separation between identifiers and other statements on Lexemes (phab:T318310)
Fixed the case where language fallback indicators where shown on Special:NewLexeme when they should not be (phab:T322687)
Adjusted the help link for the spelling variant input field (phab:T315161)
Mismatch Finder:
Finished work on better handling of dates (phab:T288511)
Finished work on allowing mismatches with empty Wikidata values to make it possible to use the Mismatch Finder also for suggesting missing data (phab:T313468)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The display of non-free media in the search bar and for article thumbnails in Special:Search has been deactivated. Further details are in T320661.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 22 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 24 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Save the date! The next WikidataCon will take place on October 28-29, 2023, and will be organized by Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Germany. The hybrid event will be streamed from Taipei and accessible for everyone online. More information and updates on d:Wikidata:WikidataCon_2023
Next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 29, 2022: We will be discussing openly managed data gathering and management with Holly Little (Smithsonian), Sabine von Mering (Museum für Naturkunde), Erica Krimmel (Florida State University), and Debra Paul (University of Illinois)! Agenda
A Hands-On Introduction to Wikidata: Thursday December 1, 2022 at 17:00 UTC. By the end of this session, you will be able to edit Wikidata records about the cultural venues that matter most to you.
Finished the adjusted statement data structure (phab:T321459)
Simplifying the structure of sitelinks in Item data (phab:T321483)
Simplifying the value format for entity ID, time and globecoordinate value types (phab:T322734)
Investigating the way forward for rate limiting (phab:T322746)
Ontology issues: Preparing a survey for re-users of Wikidata's data about the different types of ontology issues and which ones are causing the most issues for application builders
Mismatch Finder:
Finishing the work on making it possible to provide mismatches with an empty Wikidata value so the tool can also be used to suggest new data (phab:T313468)
Finishing the work on better handling of calendar models and precision for dates (phab:T288511)
Lexicographical data: Fixing bugs:
Improved the markers that indicate the field is required input (phab:T322683)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
A new preference, “Enable limited width mode”, has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also available as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. It allows for increasing the width of the page for logged-out and logged-in users. [183]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 29 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 December at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
Mathematical formulas shown in SVG image format will no longer have PNG fall-backs for browsers that don't support them. This is part of work to modernise the generation system. Showing only PNG versions was the default option until in February 2018. [184][185][186]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour on December 5. We will be working on Structured Data on Commons with a WINTER FUN theme, adding depicts statements to images and playing with some tools. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own data to work on. This will be our last scheduled Working Hour for 2022. Please join us for a relaxing and enjoyable session to wrap up a year of excellent work together. Event page
Bug Triage Hour on December 6 at 17:00 UTC, on the topic of Entity Schemas (other topics also welcome). Come with your favorite Phabricator ticket so we can improve its description together!
Save the date! The next WikidataCon will take place on October 28-29, 2023, and will be organized by Wikimedia Taiwan and Wikimedia Germany. The hybrid event will be streamed from Taipei and accessible for everyone online. More information and updates on the WikidataCon 2023 page.
How many edits does Wikidata get per second? listen.hatnote.com/#wikidata is a tool that allows you to listen to the sound of Wikidata's recent changes feed.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikisources use a tool called ProofreadPage. ProofreadPage uses OpenSeadragon which is an open source tool. The OpenSeadragon JavaScript API has been significantly re-written to support dynamically loading images. The functionality provided by the older version of the API should still work but it is no longer supported. User scripts and gadgets should migrate over to the newer version of the API. The functionality provided by the newer version of the API is documented on MediaWiki. [189][190]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 December. It will be on all wikis from 8 December (calendar).
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award will happen online on Friday 16 December 2022 at 17:00 UTC! The event will be live streamed on Youtube in the MediaWiki channel.
Planning the final pieces that still need doing before the first release
Vektor 2022: Finished work on making Vector’s new Search work with Wikidata. The changes roll out for testing on test.wikidata.org next week (phab:T275251)
Query Service:
Getting a link to the query is now possible in the same place as getting a link to the result of the query (phab:T324218)
Removed the gif that showed on hover over the button that advertises the Query Builder to make it less annoying (phab:T296135)
Added wikibase:identifiers to the autocomplete feature (phab:T302057)
Adjusted the layout of the Query Builder header to be more in line with other application (phab:T288939)
Constraint violations: When a language name is mentioned in the constraint it will now show the name of the language in the interface language instead of the language itself to make it easier to understand (phab:T316936)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The character = cannot be used in new usernames, to make usernames work better with templates. Existing usernames are not affected. [192]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 December. It will be on all wikis from 15 December (calendar).
You can now register for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2023, taking place on May 19-21 in Athens, Greece. You can also apply for a scholarship until January 14th. More information: Wikimedia Hackathon 2023/Participate
Call for Papers on Linked Open Data on Journal BiD: Deadline: Sun, 04/09/2023. Some of the ideas and issues to be included in this issue: Creation and exploitation of knowledge graphs, Information services based on linked open data and knowledge graphs, Artificial intelligence and linked open data, Textual corpora and linked open data, Textual corpora and knowledge graphs, Application of bots in linked open data, Application of bots in knowledge graphs, Linked open data and diversity of genres, Graphs of knowledge and diversity of genres, FAIR and linked open data, FAIR and knowledge graphs, Ontologies and linked open data, Ontologies and knowledge graphs, Application of ontologies in information services.
Wikidata Atlas is a system allows the user to search for different types of entities (with geo-coordinates) on Wikidata and visualize them on a world map. (Feedback is very welcome to help evaluate and improve the tool.)
The French Wikipedia now uses a Wikidata-based list for the pages on specific dates, without relying on ListeriaBot. Who was born on a December 19th and has an article in French? You now can have the answer thanks to a Wikidata query by going to the page 1er décembre on frwiki and clicking on the infobox link "Naissances du jour". This is a link to a Wikidata list provided by the query service. The query is generated by the template fr:Modèle:Naissances un jour du mois. This follows another such template used to find all persons with a certain surname on frwiki, used on all surnames pages and on some disambiguation pages, fr:Modèle:Liste des personnes ou_personnages par prénom. For the surname Victor (Q539581) (view with Reasonator, SQID) this generates on the page w:fr:Victor_(prénom) a query such as this one.
Wikidata now has more than 100,000,000 items! Exactly which item was the 100 millionth is unknown as of writing, but there are some clues for anyone who wants to dig into it.
Newest properties: This section is currently empty due to technical issues with the bot responsible for filling it. If you are interested in keeping track of new properties on Wikidata, you can check the property proposal page for updates.
REST API: We are getting ready for a release in January and would really love more people to test the current state on beta. You can find details for testing at Wikidata:REST API feedback round.
Vector 2022 search: We have worked on making the new search in the Vector 2022 skin work for Wikidata. You can now test it on test.wikidata.org and soon on Wikidata.
Query Service:
Removed the SVG download options for result views where SVG downloads are not supported, such as Map (phab:T311594)
Fixed the indentation of autocompletion suggestions (phab:T291695)
Fixed downloading query results in the Query Builder (phab:T323451)
Lexicographical data:
Working on showing the Lexeme lemmas when you look at a Lexeme’s history (phab:T312660)
Fixing a keyboard navigation issue in the lookups on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
mul language code:
Continuing to investigate how to implement language fallbacks on mobile termbox (phab:T323098)
Investigating how to disallow `mul` descriptions (phab:T313027)
Improving and harmonizing the footers in the Query Builder (phab:T324356) and Mismatch Finder (phab:T324366)
Preparing for showing constraint violations to visitors who aren’t logged in (phab:T272132)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
Because of the holidays the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 9 January 2023.
Recent changes
On a user's contributions page, you can filter it for edits with a tag like 'reverted'. Now, you can also filter for all edits that are not tagged like that. This was part of a Community Wishlist 2022 request. [194]
A new function has been used for gadget developers to add content underneath the title on article pages. This is considered a stable API that should work across all skins. Documentation is available. [195]
One of our test wikis is now being served from a new infrastructure powered by Kubernetes (read more). More Wikis will switch to this new infrastructure in early 2023. Please test and let us know of any issues. [196]
Problems
Last week, all wikis had no edit access for 9 minutes. This was caused by a database problem. [197]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week or next week.
The word "Reply" is very short in some languages, such as Arabic ("ردّ"). This makes the Discussion tools button on talk pages difficult to use. An arrow icon will be added to those languages. This will only be visible to editors who have the Beta Feature turned on. [198][199]
Future changes
Edits can be automatically "tagged" by the system software or the Abuse filter management system. Those tags link to a help page about the tags. Soon they will also link to Recent Changes to let you see other edits tagged this way. This was a Community Wishlist 2022 request. [200]
The Trust & Safety tools team have shared new plans for building the Private Incident Reporting System. The system will make it easier for editors to ask for help if they are harassed or abused.
Realtime Preview for Wikitext is coming out of beta as an enabled feature for every user of the 2010 Wikitext editor in the week of January 9, 2023. It will be available to use via the toolbar in the 2010 Wikitext editor. The feature was the 4th most popular wish of the Community Wishlist Survey 2021.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, November 9th 2022 at 17:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Andriy.vBot (approved). Task/s: I need to connect a lot of pages (more than 10 thousand) about russian villages that were created with interwiki links in ukwiki.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 10, 2023: Egon Willighagen will be introducing us to SARS-CoV-2 queries, a well-documented series of Wikidata queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the pandemic. This work contributes to Wikiproject COVID-19 and documentation is currently available in Japanese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. Agenda
The full version of View it! Tool is out! The new user script uses structured data to display related media in any Wikimedia content pages—including Wikidata items—in an on-wiki image panel or gallery view. Please join the public launch and demo of the full version of this new tool on Thursday, January 12th, 5:00 UTC via Zoom (Meeting ID: 160 454 5329) to learn more and discuss forthcoming editing features.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
About 2 months left to register for the first digital@IANLS workshop: Learn the basics of Wikidata and how to use it in your Neo-Latin research. Event is online, free, and open to all. More info on event and registration.
REST API: Preparing the first release to test.wikidata.org on January 17th and to Wikidata on January 24th
Entity Schemas: Continuing to investigate and prototype technical approaches for version 2
Mismatch Finder: Working on giving mismatch providers access to the reviews of the mismatches they uploaded (phab:T304794)
Investigated how to best do language switching for the Query Builder and Mismatch Finder. So far they only support it by specifying the language via a URL parameter and not yet via the UI (phab:T324653)
Query Service:
Lexeme IDs now have tooltips so you can see the Lemma in the SPARQL code, similar as for Items and Properties (phab:T255245)
Fixed a bug where the y-axis label on a graph were misaligned and hard to read (phab:T325808)
Lexicographical data:
Statements linking to a Sense now also show the language of the Lexeme to make it easier to see for example which language a translation statement refers to (phab:T207392)
Fixed a bug in the language dropdown on Special:NewLexeme (phab:T324743)
The Lemma of a Lexeme is now shown in the title of the revision history of the Lexeme as well (phab:T312660)
Vector 2022 theme: worked on making the search on Wikidata work in this new theme. You can test it on test.wikidata.org now and next week on Wikidata. (phab:T316093)
mul language code:
Continued investigation around how to handle language fallbacks on mobile, which is a blocker for adding this language code (phab:T323098)
Preventing the addition of descriptions for mul (phab:T313027)
Constraint violations: Working on also showing them to non-logged in users (phab:T272132)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags. [201]
You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page. [202]
A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time. [203]
Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages. [204]
You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages. [205]
Changes later this week
Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (calendar).
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
General datatypes: does not use: item or concept not used by the subject but that could have been expected, member of Roman tribe: Roman tribe in which one was inscribed
Vector 2020 skin: the search that works properly with Wikidata has been deployed
Entity Schemas: Making progress on the proof of concept that will help us figure out the technical way forward
REST API: getting ready to deploy the first version to test.wikidata.org on February 17th
Lexicographical data: When linking to a Sense in a statement the language of the Lexeme for that Sense is now also shown. This makes it easier to understand translation statements for example (phab:T207392)
Constraints: Constraint violations are now also shown to logged out users (phab:T272132)
Fixing a regression where Wikipedia and co are no longer notified about a disconnected sitelink when the Item that contains the sitelink is deleted (phab:T326082)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID] in place of diff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change. [206]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).
Some changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on Talk: and User talk: namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such as Meta talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, including Meta: pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can change your preferences (beta feature). [207]
On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page. [208]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC. Learn more.
Future changes
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in the CWS sandbox.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call January 24, 2023: We will be discussing plans for 2023, and requesting feedback and ideas for future programming. Based on a previous recommendation to host a discussion on advocacy for Wikidata within libraries, we will introduce and provide time to complete a short survey to foster conversation in a future Group Call. Please come ready to share your thoughts Agenda
Introductions to Wikidata, online meetings organized by Wikimedia Australia on January 25, 26 and 31
General datatypes: attracts (organisms attracted by this taxon), salary level (level of someone's salary), change of (property this process changes), database contains records about (indicate the types of items that the database has records about)
Ontology issues: We finalized and published the survey to better understand which types of ontology issues are most problematic for reusers of our data.
Wikipedia and co: Fixing a regression where there is no entry in recent changes and watchlist when an Item is deleted that was connected to an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue. [209]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity. [210][211]
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.
A citation hunt program was organized for secondary school students at IIS School in Dubai as part of the 74th Republic Day celebration of India. 16 students participated, with different mother tongues and from different states of India living as expatriates in Dubai. The goal was to increase references for Wikidata statements based on research. The students were introduced to the importance of protecting India's history on the internet, and were taught how to edit Wikipedia and Wikidata. They were given a special event page on Wikidata with instructions and a list of Wikidata items to add citations to, and they searched for references in their textbooks and search engines to add to the Wikidata items.More details are given here.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour January 30, 2023: The #1Lib1Ref campaign is afoot, so we will be working on adding references to Wikidata statements. We'll have some data for you to work with, but you're welcome to bring your own. We'll be mainly working with adding webpages as sources, but if you want to get experience using books or articles as sources, we recommend bringing some to the session to use as references for Wikidata items you have identified. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
theyrule.net is a website that helps to explore the boardroom connections of the largest US companies.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
AfLIA's online course Wikidata is open. Participation is free for all librarians, museums, archives and other information professionals in Africa. Call is open until 7th February 2023 (12 midnight GMT).
LetsQuiz is a new website generating quizzes using data from Wikidata.
Building cool apps and services on top of Wikidata's data but running into ontology issues? We'd love to hear from you in this survey to make things better for you.
General datatypes: place of resident registration at death (the place or administrative unit where the deceased person was registered as having his or her residence at the time of their death), has instance (thing(s) which this subject describes or encompasses, inverse property of P31), Norwegian media rating (In short, the Norwegian version of Denmark's Medierådet rating (P5970), an age rating system for motion pictures, video, internet and tv content), iconically alludes to (item that is iconically represented in the execution of this lexeme), credits URL (URL of an official webpage with a list of credits and roles attributed to various people, organizations or applications that contribute(d) to this item's existence), alternate universe counterpart (this fictional character/entity is an alternate universe counterpart of the subject), number of penalty kicks scored, precedes/follows various things (this lexeme form appears only when preceding another lexeme form with this phonological feature)
Property Suggester: We updated the data for the Property Suggester so suggestions for new statements to add to an Item should be more in line with current Property usage on other similar Items again.
Fixed an issue with Item deletions not showing up on Wikipedia and co if they affect an article on that wiki (phab:T326082)
Vector 2022: Made it possible to add a new sitelink on Wikipedia and co in the new Vector 2022 language selector (phab:T310259)
Lua: Working on two new Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage. [212]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).
Future changes
Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default. [213]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).
Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [214]
Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [215]
Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the gadget definitions prior to this change, and add skins=… for any gadgets which should not load on mobile. More details are available.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
BiodiversityBot 3 Task/s: TreatmentBank (Q54857867) is a CC0 resource that contains data on taxonomic treatments, treatment citations, figures, tables, material citations and bibliographic reference. It contains valuables links mapping scholarly articles, taxa and taxonomic treatments. This bot task involves linking research papers on taxa to taxa and related taxonomic treatments.
Closed request for permissions/Bot:
Bean49Bot 4 Task/s: Add Springer Nature person ID and Springer Nature article ID by moving from exact match property.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 7, 2023: We thought we'd try something different next week, in honor of Valentine's Day month: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project or just what you like to edit when you have time. We'd love to have an open mic session, completely informal. Please add yourselves to the list on our agenda here if you would like to talk for 5 minutes or so and share your screen, with no need for formal slides. Or just show up and talk on the spur of the moment. This will be a community session where we welcome all to participate! Agenda
Let's Quiz is a game that generates random quizzes to test your knowledge & learn something new every day.
User:Nikki/AddTermboxLanguage.js - makes it easier to add/edit labels to an item in a language other than the ones shown by default.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Building cool apps and services on top of Wikidata's data but running into ontology issues? We'd love to hear from you in this survey to make things better for you.
General datatypes: Happy Planet Index score (The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an index of human well-being and environmental impact that was introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006), credits URL (URL of an official webpage with a list of credits and roles attributed to various people, organizations or applications that contribute(d) to this item's existence), digital equivalent of (the subject is the digital equivalent of what?)
General datatypes: precedes/follows various things (this lexeme form appears only when preceding another lexeme form with this phonological feature), footnote (for use in the references section of statements: to state which footnote of the source material supports the claim in question), agent of action (thing that does the action), natural enemy (One of the causes of death of this living creatures referred to in this item, which is eaten by that creature), change of (property this process changes), object of action (thing an action is done to), variety of sense (dialect, variety or register of language that the sense applies to), bust/waist/hip measurements (chest measurement; aliases: bust measurement), usage label (list of sets of context label property (Q116547761) (language style (P6191), field of usage (P9488), has quality (P1552), variety of form (P7481), location of sense usage (P6084)). Other individual context label property (Q116547761) statement will be treated as and with this statement.), thesaurus' properties (primary topic of the subject Wikimedia thesaurus)
REST API: adding a new GET /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions endpoint (phab:T327881)
Lua: added two Lua functions, getDescriptionByLang (phab:T230839) and getBadges (phab:T305378) that make it easier to get this data on Wikipedia and co
Action API: fixed a bug that prevented the wblistentityusage API module from being used as a generator (phab:T254334)
Dates: working together with Matěj Suchánek to fix date parsing issues in Czech (phab:T221097)
Constraints: working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand why a constraint violation is happening and how to fix it (phab:T219037)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
CJMbot (CJMbot lets users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside this file is then validated and processed. New items wil be created based on the data in the CSV file and existing items wil updated by adding statements and references).
RPI2026F1Bot 5 Task/s: Import dependency and version data from PyPi
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikibase Working Hour February 13, 2023. The February Working Hour will feature a presentation by Steve Baskauf on using VanderBot with Wikibase: The Wikibase API provides a mechanism for programmatic control of uploads, and its behavior is consistent across instances (Wikidata, Structured Data in Commons, and those that are established privately). In this session, Steve will discuss basic interactions with the API and demonstrate using the VanderBot Python application to rapidly upload tabular data to a wikibase.cloud instance. After performing a mass deletion, Steve will conclude by describing how he's used the Wikibase API to facilitate addition of structured data to Commons. Registration link
Wikidata Graph Builder released a major update, introducing new layouts and visualization ideas. You can read the full changelog here.
The new Service Level Objective for the Wikidata Query Service has been implemented: the current aim is to maintain a 95% uptime based on a 90 day rolling window. You can read the full announcement here.
a.gup.pe provides group features for Mastodon. @wikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata in general. @querywikidata@a.gup.pe is a group about Wikidata queries. Anyone can join those groups simply by following them in Mastodon. Anyone can share a message with all members of those groups by mentioning them in a publication in Mastodon or any other application of the Fediverse.
The hashtag #Wikidata can be used to tag all publications related to Wikidata in Mastodon. Anyone can find recent publications using this tag using the search feature: https://wikis.world/tags/Wikidata.
Went over the feedback on the first release and deciding on the next routes to add
Added a new endpoint for getting descriptions (phab:T327881)
Worked on throwing exceptions when something goes wrong (validation failed, Item not found, etc.) instead of returning an error response object (phab:T327527)
Entity Schemas: Finished the technical exploration that will unblock the next steps for actual development
Query Service: Changed URLs with URL-encoded characters to be shown un-encoded for better line-breaks and readability (phab:T327514)
Query Builder:
Adding support for a few additional datatypes (phab:T328528)
Adding a basic language selector to make it easier to switch the language of the page (phab:T328764)
Constraint checks: Working on showing constraint clarification messages to make it easier to understand how to fix a violation on a statement (phab:T219037)
Search: Exploring design options for how to make it easier to search for entities other than Items (phab:T327507)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [216]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [218][219][220]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [221]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [222][223][224]
ScikingBot (Task/s: The bot is going to fix interwiki links for the Lombard Wikipedia)
fromCrossrefBot (Task/s: Importing licenses for 1.45 million CC licensed papers from the Crossref April 2022 dump.)
Closed requests for permissions/Bot:
Cmtqwikibot 2 (Task/s: Add credits (cast and crew) for audiovisual work produced in Quebec based on the Cinémathèque québécoise's catalogue data. Adds reference. Deletes redundant, more general existing statements in certain circumstances.)
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Eager to discover the potential of Wikidata and Wikibase for semantics? SEMIC is organising a series of workshops that are very much hands-on. Join the first workshop online on 24 January 2023 from 14:00 to 16:00 (CET) via Webex. Register for the first event via this link!
Wikibase Suite Survey is now open! The goal is to understand what role Wikibase plays in your organization and identify what you need from Wikibase based on how you currently make use of it.
rebuilt (year or date when the structure was reconstructed, rebuilt, repurposed or replaced by similar one (if the new and old structures have separate items, use P167/P1398 links instead))
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [225][226]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [227]
Biondibot (Task/s: Import us patent from a csv file)
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call March 7, 2023: Lydia Pintscher and Silvan Heintze will tell us about the new Wikidata REST API and Silvan will demonstrate some of its aspects. Agenda
Bug Triage Hour on dates input, March 13th: Following up on an issue on date parsing in the Czech language (T221097), fixed earlier in February, we would like to look at the changes induced by this fix together, check how the date input parsing works in your language, and identify some possibly remaining issues.
Open Data Day Taiwan 2023 recorded livestreams: Day 1; Day 2
Wikidata for History of Science projects, by Martin Poulter - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia via categories - YouTube
How to add Wikidata properties using PetScan in Finnish Wikipedia 2 - YouTube
LD4P3 - Browsing Across Music With Obtainable Wikidata - YouTube
Extracting political data & relations from Wikidata - YouTube
Operation of Wikidata and its centralized management of metadata linked to multiple databases (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata and higher education and research libraries (in French) - YouTube
Wikidata supporting open student research projects in plant chemistry - YouTube
Tool of the week
wikidata-todo is a tool that helps you find Commons categories with files, where none of the files are used on Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WMDE Wikibase.Cloud team is currently seeking individuals who are interested in participating in interviews regarding the pressing issue of data modeling. Please reach out if you'd like to participate.
Search: We are looking deeper into how we can make it possible to search for Properties, Lexemes and EntitySchemas in the search box, not just Items (phab:T321543)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [228]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [229]
bitbotje (Task/s: Property MovieMeter film ID (P1970) has a suggested constraint that the item should have a Dutch ('nl') label. The MovieMeter website has suitable labels and provides an API for structured data access. I have a script that reads the relevant section in Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P1970 and for each listed item does an API call to moviemeter.nl and adds a label.)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [230][231]
Upcoming: WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Blogs
In this week's update by the Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions team, they are asking where the right place to store and maintain Abstract Wikipedia should be. All of the options involve Wikidata to some extent, some more, some less. If the content of Abstract Wikipedia is hosted on Wikidata, that would lead to an increased scope for the Wikidata community (and likely more contributors joining). But that is a decision the Wikidata community needs to be involved in as well. (Also, if you are interested, the Abstract Wikipedia updates might be worth to follow.)
EntitySchemas: We are preparing for adding a new datatype and other changes by improving tests, documentation, etc.
Date input: We did a bug triage hour around issues with date parsing and improved it for Japanese dates (phab:T214002)
Ontology issues: We started evaluating the survey responses for the survey about different types of ontology issues reusers are facing. More work is needed before we have results.
REST API: We finished work on including the URL of an article in sitelink data (phab:T330252) as well as providing all aliases of an Item (phab:T327882)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [232]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [233]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour March 27, 2023: We will be creating items related to notable book podcasts. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on.Event page
WikiCite Monthly Meeting, online on 28 March 2023 at 16:00 UTC. Information and notes
ISCED Attainment (ISCED attainment is the UNESCO main classification of educational level, it is used to map each level to the global classification used by UNESCO. This is useful because the same local level can mean different things in different countries. It identifies the specific levels of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Attainment model. Has two sub qualifiers - code and label.)
first performance by (performer or performing group for the first performance of a work)
EntitySchemas: We started working on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements (phab:T214884)
Query Builder: We finished the work on the language selector so you can swithc the interface language of the tool (phab:T328148) It will be available on the site in the next days.
Wikibase REST API: We implemented the functionality to provide an Item's label, description or aliases in a specific language (phab:T323173)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [234]
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [236]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [238]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call April 4, 2023: Magnus Manske will discuss Wikidata editing tools and tools that use linked data from other sources (eg GND, VIAF) to integrate in Wikidata. Agenda
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories. [239][240][241][242][243]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version. [244]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide. [245]
Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account. [246]
You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page. [247][248][249]
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed. [252]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [253][254]
BotFunast (Task: The bot is already operational in the Tachelhit Wikipedia. One of its main tasks is editing template tags and categories, and creating new ones when necessary, based on a csv database (that you can find in github) . When adding new pages though, a common problem is to link those to Wikidata. This can be unfeasible by hand in a reasonable amount of time, when hundreds of pages, e.g. categories, are added at once. The idea is to have the bot approved for Wikidata, so it can link the pages to their counterparts in other languages automatically.)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
orchestration (the instruments used in a musical composition or arrangement in notated form)
part of other combined lexeme (qualifier on P5238 to indicate that a component appearing in a compound lexeme actually comes from the appearance of another compound lexeme)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 19th April 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call, Tuesday, April 14, 2023 - Indigenous Artists and Wikidata: Report launch and discussion. Agenda.
Christos started a Wikibase to collect and organise existing research-related resources about Wikibase. Feel free to add to it. researchwb.wikibase.cloud
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on creating the new datatype that allows linking to EntitySchemas in statements. It will be available on test systems next. (phab:T332139)
QueryBuilder: We are putting finishing touches on the language selector so you can switch the UI language of the Query Builder. (phab:T328764)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on making it possible to create or replace labels and descriptions in a iven language. (phab:T323813)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week. [258][259]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed. [260]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour April 24, 2023: Would you like to know how to join and use Telegram? Two regular Wikidata Telegram users will provide an introduction to Telegram and its available Wikidata channels. They will discuss how they use it, how it can provide help with Wikidata work, and how it can facilitate connections with other Wikidata users Event page
User:Nikki/colour icons.css - is a Userscript to add colour to the editing icons. It uses green for add/save, yellow for edit, red for remove, orange for cancel and blue for help.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase newbie docs are here (to help to onboard new Wikibase users easier).
REST API: We continued work on making it possible to create or replace a label, or a description in a given language (phab:T323813)
EntitySchemas: We continued working on the new datatype for linking to EntitySchemas. It is now available on beta in a very bare-bones version but not ready for wider testing yet. (phab:T332139)
Ontology issues: We are evaluating the results of the survey we ran earlier this year.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities. [262]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed. [263][264][265]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [266]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [270]
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [271]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot:
ForgesBot (Task: Add licensing information to software forges entries in accordance to what is found in the corresponding Wikipedia page. It is used as a helper in the context of the Forges project)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 2, 2023: Fudie Zhao will be presenting on Wikidata in Digital Humanities projects. Agenda
WeChangEd is an ERC-funded research project and online database by Ghent University, about women editors in Europe. The database shows stories about women editors and their publications, and is powered by Wikidata and Sciencestories.io.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [272]
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [273]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [275]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [276]
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [278][279]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [280]
EntitySchemas: We've continued work on the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements. (phab:T214884)
Converted a number of Properties from string to external ID datatype (phab:T334450)
mul language code: We've worked on preparing the special pages related to labels, descriptions and aliases for the new language code. (phab:T330193, phab:T329626)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the ability to modify labels of an Item using the HTTP PATCH method. (phab:T332739).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [281]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [282]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [283]
Wikimedia Deutschland is launching a laptop donation program to support Wikidata contributors with limited access to technology. If you've been actively contributing to Wikidata for at least a year, you can request a free laptop to support your work. WMDE Hardware Donation Program#Applying
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [285]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call May 30, 2023: We will discuss results from our community survey on advocacy for Wikidata in libraries and hear from community members Mary Aycock, Steve Baskauf and Eric Willey about their experiences with advocacy and gaining support for Wikidata work within their respective libraries. Agenda
TalkPageHeader.js shows the talk page header for languages other than English.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The libraries of the London School of Economics and the University of York have collaborated to produce a toolkit for uploading research theses metadata to Wikidata. Full announcement and access to the toolkit
The contents of most Wikimedia Cloud Services Wiki Replicas are out-of-date owing to large & increasing replication lag; see https://replag.toolforge.org/ & Phab T337446. Exercise caution using data from any tools that have a dependency on these databases.
ISCED category orientation (International Standard Classification of Education category (based on focus/orientation) applicable to an educational program)
Learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [286]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [288]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [289]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [291]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [292]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [293]
Introduction workshop about Wikidata for employees of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, national library of the Netherlands), to make them more familiar and self-reliant with Wikidata - 6 June 2023, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands - Slides (in Dutch) on Commons.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 5, 2023: In collaboration with the Black Bibliography Project, we will be adding metadata for undescribed or under-described African-American women authors listed in The Pen Is Ours: a Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women before 1910, compiled by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond.Event page
Registration has opened for the workshop on mathematical research data taking place on 9-11 October 2023 in Leipzig. Talks, demos and lightning talks can be suggested, including Wikidata-related ones.
Tool of the week
IdentifierInput makes it easier to add identifier properties by letting you put in the full url and then stripping it down to just the identifier for you.
beforehand owned by (person or institution that owned the subject just before stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
afterward owned by (person or institution that owned the subject after stated event. Meant to be used as qualifier of "significant event (P793)" for events like sales, auctions, gifts, etc)
solubility product constant (equilibrium constant for a sparingly soluble solid chemical substance dissolved in an aqueous solution)
funded by grant (title or name of the grant funding this item)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the new endpoint for patching labels (phab:T332739). We also started work on the new endpoint for retrieving Property data (phab:T337720)
Client wikis: We drastically reduced the size of a ResourceLoader module that’s loaded on most Wikipedia page views (phab:334682)
Language code: With awesome help from Nikki, we improved documentation for how to add language codes to Wikibase/Wikidata (phab:T335857)
EntitySchemas: We are getting the new datatype ready for testing.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Call June 13, 2023: Helen Williams will discuss her work with Wikidata at the London School of Economics Agenda
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [295]
The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [296]
The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [297]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [298]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [299]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix. [300]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [301]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
The role of Wikidata within the research lifecycle, Wednesday 21 June, 10am BST (UTC+1), online event hosted by the University of York, UK. International participation is welcome, despite "available to White Rose institutions only" on the booking page.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour June 23, 2023: Returning to Podcasts, we will be working on creating podcast episode pages. We will discuss how this episodic content can be transferred to other serialized items. You are, as always, welcome to bring your own project to work on Event page
Webinar: Common European Data Space for cultural heritage (The ontology of Wikidata, how to interact with it for a better quality). Tuesday 20th June 2023, from 3.00 p,.m. to 5.00 p.m. CET. Register
Mapping Diversity is a platform that utilizes Wikidata to discover key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe. E.g. 59% of the streets and squares in Paris are named after people. Of those, 8.9% are named after women.
mul language code: We've continued working on making the mobile termbox (labels, descriptions, aliases) ready for the new language code. (phab:T329644, phab:T338302, phab:T329655, phab:T316767)
Vector 2022 skin: We are fixing an issue with the bolding of results in the main search suggester. (phab:T327510)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug. [302][303]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [304][305]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table. [306]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours. [307][308]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [309][310]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [311]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [312]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: Wolverène (RfP scheduled to end after 2 July 2023 18:46 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Vargenau (successful) Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
re:publica 2023 - Peer learning methods and Open Educational Resources (OER) on Wikidata for a viable digital culture of remembrance (in German) - YouTube
Workshop - Aligning Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies with Wikidata - YouTube
Managing conflations and duplications of personal items in Wikidata, National Library of Greece - YouTube
Why Wikidata in Linked Data and Libraries (in Greek)- YouTube
Adding metadata utilities in the Koha staff interface based on Wikidata - YouTube
From authority control to identity management - YouTube
DSI Webinar - The ontology of Wikidata: how to interact with it for a better quality - YouTube
Wikidata as a tool for biocuration of cell types, Biocuration Conference 2023 - YouTube
Webinar: Wikidata, a useful knowledge base for any study - YouTube
KGC '23 Talk — The Error Is The Message: Extracting Insights From Deceptive Data for Nazi-Looted Art - YouTube
TU Berlin research group "The Restitution of Knowledge" are exploring the use of Wikidata to build a Linked Open Data (LOD) project that maps German colonial military expeditions into Africa. Interested in getting involved or learning more about their project? Reach out on the project's talk page: Wikidata:WikiProject TheRoK/Data Models.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: koavf 3 (RfP scheduled to end after 8 July 2023 13:16 UTC)
Closed request for adminship: Wolverène Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: UrbanBot (Task: UrbanBot's task is to mass-add English descriptions to items that don't have one)
Closed request for permissions/Bot: RomesfulImporterBot (Task: Creating and updating Russian Lexemes by transferring information from the Russian Wiktionary)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour July 7, 2023: Let's collaborate to upgrade our community infrastructure! We'll transfer notes and content from Google Docs to our WikiProject subpages. We'll be practicing our Wiki markup skills and learning to manage Wikidata Project pages Event page
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #99, Breast milk (Challenge started on 2023-07-03 12:01:21)
m:User:Base/Scripts/HaveWikibaseLabelLowercased.js - is a Userscript that adds an arrow next to the main label (page title) which upon double click (a tap and a confirmation on touch devices) automatically makes the label's first letter lowercase for the current interface language. If there was already a matching alias it gets removed.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The WikidataCon 2023 call for proposals is running until July 31st. If you have questions or need advice before sending a program proposal, join the program team during one of the office hour sessions (online or in Taiwan, in Chinese or in English). More information
Nigerian registered company (RC) id (RC number (Registration Number), identifier assigned to a business by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in Nigeria)
Cent cols (A property to link Wikidata entries to the dedicated pages of each pass by the Cent Cols)
WikiProject Scotland's Accused Witches aims at producing structured data documenting witchhunts, and prosecuted Scotland's accused witches on Wikidata using the University of Edinburgh's landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (1563 to 1736).
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the GetProperty endpoint with fields filter and Conditional headers (phab:T338141, phab:T338138)
We started working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356), phab:T338383)
Ontology issue survey: We put together an overview of solutions for the various types of issues and will share them this week.
mul language code: We are continuing to work through the language fallback issues that were uncovered.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [316]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: koavf 3 Welcome onboard \o/
New requests for permissions/Bot: FromCrossrefBot 1: Publication dates (Task/s: Using information from Crossref: 1 - Add publication date to items where they are not present in Wikidata 2 - Fix publication dates where they are erroneous)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 12th July 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
How to create a Wikidata Lexeme with ease - Beginner's Guide (in Twi and English) YouTube
Tool of the week
Duplicity is a tool on Toolforge that helps find articles on Wikipedia that do not have a Wikidata Item, and match them to an existing Item, or create a new one. (example for English Wikipedia)
HasProperty.js displays presence/absence of specific properties (configurable) after the Statements heading. Clicking a property name will jump to that properties section. For absent property, clicking property name will jump to the end of the page.
mul language code: We continued work on it focusing on showing it in the right place in the desktop termbox (phab:T316767)
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the endpoints for reading statement data of Properties (both a single statement, and a list of all of a Property’s statement) (phab:T339356, phab:T338383)
Vector 2022 skin: We continued work on improving the search display (phab:T327510)
WMF Governance wiki is now connected to Wikidata so can be linked to in the sitelink section under multilingual sites (phab:T321967)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [318]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [319]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [320]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [321]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
Wikidata Recent Changes API (simple front-end to the actual API) lets you query Wikidata edits by either properties, or labels/aliases/descriptions/sitelinks. You can retrieve any changes, or specify added/changed/removed. Current lag to Wikidata: 1 seconds. (blog)
autosuggest value (qualifier for P1963 that suggests which values should be autosuggested to the user that uses the property for items that are instances of the subject)
WikiProject Antiquity (aims to gather all contributors working in an aspect or another of Antiquity)
WikiProject Lodging (aims at creating, improving, and organizing Wikidata items related to lodging, such as hotels, motels, inns, guest houses and lodging-related topics)
Development
Vector 2022 skin: We finished working on removing the strange bolding pattern of the Search Results on Wikidata. Should be rolled out in the next train (phab:T327510)
EntitySchemas: We are working on showing the Label of EntitySchema in Statements and Special pages (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding the Language Selector to the Mismatch Finder (phab:T328149)
mul: We trying out changing how placeholders in Wikibase termboxes work: They’ll soon start falling back across the fallback chain of the language until they hit mul (phab:T340832)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [322]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [323]
Missed the initial office hour sessions for preparing a WikidataCon 2023 submission? Join the next sessions on 20th, 22nd, and 26th and bring all your questions. Wikidata:WikidataCon 2023#Office hours (available in both Mandarin and English)
Live Wikidata editing in Italian, July 25 at 9:00 PM CEST on YouTube
Ongoing
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #102, Money (Challenge started on 2023-07-24 12:01:19)
Images near items - helps to find Wikimedia Commons images near Wikidata items without image. It can load a category tree of Commons images with coodrinates, and then find Wikidata items of a certain P31 with coordinates but without images. Then, it will try to find nearby (<50 meters) pairs. (example link for UK red phone booths)
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
EntitySchemas: We expanded the new datatype that is in testing. When a statement links to an EntitySchema it will now show its label when available (phab:T338613). We are also working on showing them by their label in recent changes and similar places (phab:T214885).
mul language code: we are working on improving the termbox to integrate this new language code better (phab:T340644)
Mismatch Finder: We are working on adding a language selector to it so you can switch the language of the tool (phab:T328149)
Wikibase REST API: We completed two new endpoint for the Wikibase REST API:
Retrieve all statements from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements
Retrieve a single statement from a Property - /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id}
You can also retrieve a single statement from a Property from the existing /statements/{statement_id} endpoint
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
The deadline for submitting your proposals for WikidataCon 2023 is July 31st (23:59) anywhere in the world. Submit your proposals at https://pretalx.com/wikidatacon2023/
Top scorer (This property is for the best scorer of a single season of a team sport's competition, or even for the best ever scorer of the history of a competition. The qualifiers to be admitted to this property should be: {{p|54}}; {{p|1532}}; {{p|1013}} (es.: goals / tries / points / etc ).)
Project partner (property to list the partners of a project or an event, when different from the organizing body.)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements (phab:T339356) (new route)
GET /entities/properties/{property_id}/statements/{statement_id} (phab:T338383) (new route)
GET /statements/{statement_id} (now supports statements on Properties)
We started work on a new route for replacing the data of a statement on a Property (phab:T340006)
EntitySchemas:
We worked on improving the termbox (the table of labels, descriptions and aliases) on EntitySchema pages to bring it more in line with the one on Items and Properties
We made sure that EntitySchemas are shown by their label instead of ID when available in Recent Changes and similar lists (phab:T339924)
Mismatch Finder: We added a language selector so you can switch the interface language (phab:T328149)
mul language code: We are working on showing more labels from fallback languags in the termbox (phab:T340832, phab:T338330)
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [324][325]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [326]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [327]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [328]
WikiShootMe expanded to make it possible to find the Items close to pictures you took so you can upload and add them to them (source)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Synia is a new template which makes it easy to create links to Synia from Wikidata. Template:Synia+ guesses the relevant configuration pages for each entity depending on the values of P31 and P106.
Wikifunctions, Wikidata's newest sibling project, had a soft launch. Welcome to the Wikimedia wikiverse, functioneers!
The ORES service will be decommissioned and replaced by Lift Wing. If you have a tool that relies on ORES scores to judge edits or the quality of an Item please read the migration announcement. We are collecting affected community tools in phab:T343419.
disinherited (someone who received or will receive no or little the subject's property or title even if otherwise eligible, (partially) the opposite of [[Wikidata:Property proposal/heir or beneficiary]])
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [329]
Wikimania 2023 (16–19 August, Singapore and Online) program is out: wikimania:2023:Program
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 18, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The first Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover creating a bibliography of diverse LIS articles and books. We will generate a spreadsheet of sources ready for use during subsequent Working Hours. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Everything is connected - is a knowledge-based puzzle game where players must fit square pieces representing entities in the world together based on their known connections.
Steam Deck compatibility rating (official rating used to determine which games, as a result of the review process, are compatible with Steam Deck and which are not)
name version for other gender (use for when names that are not given name or surnames are gendered (since those two have their own properties), would also be helpful for many noble titles and honorifics as well as affixes)
Curator of (has curated a collection or (art) exhibition)
WikiProject Svenska Grillplatser (WikiProject Swedish Grill Places) - The idea is to see what Wikidata and OSM can contribute when it comes to barbecue sites and connections to municipalities, grillplatser.nu, naturkartan.
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [330]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [331]
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
WHO Aware Classification (The World Health Organization currently classifies 258 antibiotics into "Access", "Watch", and "Reserve" based partly on the risk of resistance developing as a result of such use and critical nature of the antibiotic in question.)
nombre de niveaux (number of levels in a video game or number of stages in a particular sport)
URL du plan du jeu vidéo (URL of the video game detailed map in subject provided by the site CPC-Power)
Positioning (A list of all the satellite navigation system (ex. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS, NavIC etc. ) a mobile device, or a smartphone supports. [https://w.wiki/7HE9 List of all the Satellite Navigation System].)
place on the route (object, station, facility, city, natural formation or other place on a road, track, route, line, watercourse, utility line or other linear route)
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [342]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [343]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [344]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [345][346]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [347]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for permissions/Bot: TiagoLubianaBot 2 (Task: The Open Targets Platform is an important biomedical resource that makes its data available under a CC0 license waiver. The request at hand is to extend the permissions of User:TiagoLubianaBot to import information from Open Targets, initially with a focus on physical interactions between proteins and drugs.)
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #107, Teeth (Challenge started on 2023-08-28 12:01:31)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour August 28, 2023. We will cover adding the articles from our bibliography of diverse LIS resources that we created in our last session to Wikidata! We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements. To get a sneak preview of what we will be doing, you can learn more about the Wikidata & Zotero link here: Wikidata:Zotero. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Keynote about Wikidata for the Chinese Confernence on Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing 2023, by Denny Vrandečić - YouTube
How to fill an Infobox on Wikipedia using Wikidata - Wikipedia For Beginners - YouTube
The impact of Wikidata-powered inboxes on minority and low-resourced language Wikipedias in Africa (Wikimania 2023) - YouTube
How to create item in Wikidata about a village (in Malayalam) - YouTube
Add Wikidata link to an OpenStreetMap relation (in Guarani) - YouTube
WikiDBs: A Corpus Of Relational Databases From Wikidata - YouTube
Tool of the week
Wikitrivia is a web-based game that challenges your knowledge of historical events, people, and places. The game is a combination of Sudoku and Scrabble, and all the data used in the game is sourced from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The objective of the game is to place the cards on the timeline in the correct order.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Biyanto Rebin is joining the Software Communication team (SCoT) at Wikimedia Deutschland for 2.5 months as an intern. Welcome!
simule (the element imitates or makes the value of the property appear real)
sexe ou genre du protagoniste (regarding the work in question, For human: male, female, non-binary, intersex, transgender female, transgender male, agender. For animal: male organism, female organism. Groups of same gender use subclass of (P279))
unofficial name (name which is widely or rarely used, but not official (for nicknames use P1449, for pseudonymes P742))
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: FlyingAce (RfP scheduled to end after 8 September 2023 23:32 UTC)
New request for comments: Must 'Serious' WikiData sources be selective? (The disagreement regards the interpretation of WD:N rule number two, which states an item is acceptable if: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references.")
Job opening: Software Engineer (Wikidata) (m/f/d). For our Team Wikidata, based in Berlin, we are looking for a permanent Software Engineer (m/f/d), full-time or part-time (min. 32h/week), as soon as possible.
Wikidata's eleventh birthday is around the corner! One of our traditions is to prepare birthday presents to the community. Now is a great time to start preparing yours!
has heir or beneficiary (people or organizations that received, or will receive, (all or part of) the subject's property or title)
towing capacity (the maximum sustainable force with which this vehicle can pull or push another object. Alternatively for road- or track-vehicles, the maximum weight of an object on wheels that this vehicle can reliably and safely pull given usual slopes)
learning outcome (specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that students are expected to acquire as a result of participating in a particular education program)
tribe (recognised membership in a society, mainly denoted by shared cultural heritage; for ethnicity use P172)
Latest comment: 10 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [348]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [350]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [352]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [353][354]
Peppercat is a website listing government ministers, and other key political leaders, from all over the world, taking data from Wikidata. More information
state of transmission (state of transmission of a work (as a concept, not as a physical item; for that, use P5816))
describes actor of (predicate sense whose actor (an agent or a cause—basically the instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
describes undergoer of (predicate sense whose undergoer (a patient, a theme, or a recipient—basically a non-instigator of an action) is denoted by this sense)
Machine learning: We are migrating some tools that currently use ORES to the new Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work around the new datatype to link to EntitySchemas in statements
Query Builder: We fixed some issues in the Query Builder language selector (phab:T344231)
We’re making the warning for anonymous editors more useful by letting them return to the page they came from after logging in (phab:T330550); we’re also working on showing those warnings in the first place in WikibaseLexeme (phab:T343979)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on the ability to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and get the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [355]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [356]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [357]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [358]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 15, 2023. We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.More information on the event page
chronological designation (as a typical instance, the stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: the reference source being cited to support the statement being made)
We are planning the migration of some of our existing components from the Wikit to the Codex design system in Query Builder, Mismatch Finder and the Special:NewLexeme page.
Warnings about not being logged-in will now have a returnto= parameter attached to their links, so that you can don’t use your flow from logging in (phab:T330550)
We fixed an issue with the LanguageSwitcher in Query Builder where it would open out of the viewport on some tablet screen widths (phab:T344231)
Wikibase REST API: We finished the work on making it possible to remove a statement from a Property (phab:T342976) and getting the labels of a Property (phab:T342977)
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [359][360]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
WikidataCon 2023, the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community, is taking place on October 28-29, online all around the world and onsite in Taipei. You can now register for the conference.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour September 29. This event is part of a series where you can gain hands-on experience with Wikidata by working on a diverse library and information science (LIS) dataset. In this fourth session, we'll introduce the Wikimedia PAWS environment for data gathering and processing in your Wikidata projects. We'll focus on web scraping for article data using Python and the Beautiful Soup package for parsing. You'll learn about data models for making your data accessible to both machines and humans. This session will be recorded and shared on the event page. Event page.
Ongoing: Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
User:Luca.favorido/linkypop.js is a script that can be used to search an identifier on an external site. It provides a button to search for an identifier as soon as you type it in the property input field. For example, if you type “ORCID”, an icon with a lens will appear, and when you click it, a new tab will open with the ORCID site looking for the name of the researcher. You can then copy the URL and paste it to Wikidata.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Want to play a game? Wikidata:Games has some Wikidata-related ones for you.
Citation.js Toolforge is a service to export citations from Wikidata items in various formats (BibTeX, RIS) and various citations formats (Vancouver, APA, etc)
type of musical notation (system of musical notation used on a given music source or composition)
chronological designation (stated scholarly journal year to which reference is made by: source cited in support of a particular statement may not be the same as the publication date or volume)
We worked on making it possible to upload mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
We are continuing to migrate tools from ORES to Lift Wing (phab:T343731)
We've added Wikifunktions as a new wiki for sitelinks (phab:T342857)
Wikibase REST API: We are working on making it possible to get labels, descriptions and aliases from a Property as well as modify the description of an Item
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [363]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [364][365]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
January 12 - 14, 2024, Berlin, Germany (and online) - CFP: Provenance Loves Wiki - A workshop on art history, art science and provenance research in Wikidata/Wikipedia & Wikibase
Ongoing
Weekly Lexemes Challenge #110, Ohm's law (Challenge started on 2023-09-25 12:01:32)
This Week
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 3, 2023: Lars Willighagen will discuss on citation.js.org, Wikidata, and plans for more linked data. Agenda
Wikidata for Better Health (in French) - Houcemeddine Turki, Faculty of Sciences SFAX < closing session of "Adapting Wikidata to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning"
Swiss Archives is an interactive overview map of the Swiss archives present in Wikidata have corresponding Wikipedia articles and in which language (FR, DE, IT), allowing interested Wikimedians to know where they can contribute or expand. - Michael Gasser (X post)
WikiProject GLAM-BW - a project to connect major collections held by museums in Baden-Württemberg by uploading information on collectors, former collection locations, collecting histories, and objects
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We are finalizing the work on getting the labels, descriptions and aliases of a Property.
We are finishing work on modifying the descriptions of an Item.
You can now add sitelinks to Wikifunctions (phab:T342857)
We improved the “required” marker on Special:NewLexeme, hopefully making its meaning clearer (phab:T322683)
If you are not logged-in, you’ll also get the yellow warning when editing Lexeme’s Lemmas, Forms, and Senses (phab:T343979)
We added the tlh-latn and tlh-piqd codes for monolingual text, so that now you can add the titles to Shakepear’s works in the original Klingon (phab:T286239)
Mismatch Finder:
Failed uploads now no longer offer to download review results (phab:T335864)
We are working on the ability to report mismatches on qualifiers (phab:T313467)
The Mismatch Finder will show a clarifying message when Java Script is disabled (phab:T343344)
Latest comment: 9 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [366]
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [367]
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [368]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [369]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[370]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 13, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The fifth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover manually adding authors and publishers from our bibliography into Wikidata. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page. Event page
Is AI lying to us? These researchers built an LLM lie detector of sorts to find out - Tiernan Ray, ZDNET ("Step one is to come up with a list of over 20,000 questions and known answers, drawn from sources such as Wikidata, for which the large language model, in this case, OpenAI's GPT-3.5, can be reliably expected to provide the correct answer.")
Data Scraping, Gathering & Annotation (in Ukrainian VO, English text) < lecture on data gathering, Wikidata, SPARQL and structured data from Ukrainian Catholic University
Wikidata: first pragmatic approach - Ismael Olea - OpenSouthCode 2023 < an introduction to Wikidata - the objective of this talk is for the public to leave amazed and addicted to Wikidata.
Tool of the week
https://aletheiafact.org <- is a new fact-checking website using Wikidata for people/concept identification. The website allows users to contribute to fact-checking claims made by public figures, such as politicians, celebrities, and influencers.
Wikibase REST API: We worked on the new routes for PATCHing Property and Item aliases as well as PUTing Property labels and descriptions (phab:T342982, phab:T337371, phab:T337371, phab:T348150)
We are continuing to work on fixing an issue with Lexeme pages missing styles and scripts (phab:T344362)
We’re adding some missing license notes to some javascript UI interfaces (phab:343998, phab:T343999)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on supporting mismatches for data that is stored in qualifiers (phab:T313467)
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 17, 2023: Our scheduled speaker had to unexpectedly cancel, so please join us to transfer group call notes from the Google Drive to the wiki project page (see instructions link in agenda document!) Agenda
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC, 18th October 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Wikidata Day NYC '23 Join fellow Wikidata-enthusiasts on October 29th at the Butler Library, 114th Street West, NYC for a free Wikidata-celebration with a selection of engaging workshops and presentations to attend.
State of the Map EU 2023 has a session on OSM-Wikidata Map Framework on Sunday, 12th Nov., taking place in Antwerp, Belgium.
Wikidata Days: WM-Peru (in Spanish) attend a 2-day event, with sessions devoted to Wikidata, OpenRefine, QuickStatements and SPARQL.
Wikimedia Chile: Wikidata Training Course Staying in South America, Chilean and all Spanish-speakers can attend a 4-day Course and earn a participation Certificate. Online event - 17 to 20th October.
Press: Indexing news with AI via BroadCast Pro ME ("We are able to create a rich multilingual archive, leveraging translations based on the Wikidata knowledge graph.")
Drag'n'Drop Gadget <-- This handy gadget allows you to click and drag information from a Wikipedia article and add it to a Wikidata-item as a Statement. By Magnus Sälgö.
LIVE Wikidata editing #110 <-- Ainali and Abbe98 do some live editing on Wikidata (in English), and discuss the thought process of what we are doing and why we do it.
User:Nikki/ChecksumCheck.js <-- This script displays a symbol after external identifiers which contain checksums, to indicate whether the checksum in the identifier is correct. Currently only supporting a small number of Identifiers.
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Unified login system's edge login should now be fixed for some browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera). This means that if you visit a new sister project wiki, you should be logged in automatically without the need to click "Log in" or reload the page. Feedback on whether it's working for you is welcome. [371]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 October. It will be on all wikis from 19 October (calendar).
Future changes
In 3 weeks, in the Vector 2022 skin, code related to addPortletLink and #p-namespaces that was deprecated one year ago will be removed. If you notice tools that should appear next to the "Discussion" tab are then missing, please tell the gadget's maintainers to see instructions in the Phabricator task.
Edit-A-Thon for LGBTQ+ History Month < Binghamton University Library, New York, Oct. 25th. Help make visible the important contributions of queer figures.
Wikidata Birthday Edit-A-Thon (Albanian) < Albanian language Wikimedians celebrate Wikidata's Birthday with a 2-day event (Oct. 28 - 29, 2023) near the "Aleksandër Xhuvani" University, Elbasan.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour October 23, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The sixth Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover batch creating items using OpenRefine.This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the Event page
4th Wikidata Workshop as part of the International Semantic Web Conference. 7th Nov., Athens, Greece.
Live Editing #110 < Develop your SPARQL query-building skills in this follow-along session.
Tutorial on Wikidata for or WikiConnect course (in Portuguese) <-- Explaining the Wiki Movimento Brasil's WikiConecta Wikidata course. The course entails Understanding what Wikidata is and its operating logic, Learning the basics of editing and recovering data, and Understanding why and how to use Wikidata with your students.
Birthday Presents from Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit:
MedCYN as an intuitive web tool for Wikidata-based clinical decision support.
MeSH2Wikidata as an approach for validating and classifying biomedical relations in Wikidata based on MeSH Keywords of PubMed scholarly publications.
Tool of the week
User:Magnus Manske/annas archive.js is a userscript that automatically links to Anna's Archive from Wikidata items for books and research articles, for title, DOI, ISBN, etc. so that people can easily get access to them.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the Wikidata Query Service scaling of the backend, that explains how the team will experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph and use federation for the queries that need access to all subgraphs.
Mismatch Finder tool improvements: In the next deployment scheduled for November 1, the tool will let you report mismatches on qualifiers in addition to the main part of a statement.
We are preparing for WikidataCon and the Data Modelling Days.
We are looking more into where Wikibase needs to be adapted to the upcoming IP Masking changes.
We added a notification about the license to all edits to labels, descriptions and aliases that was missing still (phab:T343998) The same for Lexemes is coming next (phab:T343999)
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new Language and internationalization newsletter, written quarterly. It contains updates on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects, and related support work.
Source map support has been enabled on all wikis. When you open the debugger in your browser's developer tools, you should be able to see the unminified JavaScript source code. [372]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 October. It will be on all wikis from 26 October (calendar).
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to the 600th Weekly Summary!
Lydia initiated the weekly newsletter at the start of the Wikidata project, before it even went live, to keep the community in the loop about the developments, the new projects and tools. Léa carried on the newsletter in 2016 and then it was my turn in 2020. The newsletter has been going strong for eleven years, with its content powered by the community, and delivered every week without fail. Thank you to everyone who helped fill in the different sections of the Weekly Summary thus far ❤️ --Mohammed
Today it is time to celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday. Let’s take a look back at the past year and what’s coming.
Wikidata’s world - map of Wikidata Items with a geocoordinate
There are now over 12.200 amazing people who are actively editing on Wikidata - 3000 of them even making more than 100 edits a month ♥️ Thank you! Without you Wikidata wouldn’t be what it is today. Thank you for helping give more people more access to more knowledge every single day. This year also marks the year we can welcome a new sister to the Wikimedia projects: Wikifunctions is live, letting us all geek out on functions in anticipation of Abstract Wikipedia. Another big milestone was Wikibase Cloud coming out of private beta. Now you can more easily run your own Wikibase and collect and maintain data that doesn’t fit into Wikidata. 2023 was also the year when the efforts of Wikidata editors were recognized across the Wikimedia movement with the awarding of the Wikimedian of the Year award to Taufik Rosman and the Wikimedia Laureate award to Siobhan Leachman. Over the coming year I want us to find ways how we can bring more people, who are already editing a bit here and there, closer to the community and help them find their place in our community. If you are one of them and have not found your place yet, check out a WikiProject related to your interests. Wikidata has something for everyone 😉
Wikidata now has over 106 Million Items and nearly 1.2 Million Lexemes. We are closing in on 2 Billion edits, making about 20 Million edits per month. All this content is used to create useful, quirky, educational or just fun applications that wouldn’t be possible without Wikidata and all the work you put into it. Check out Notable People for example. Over the coming year we want to make that even easier by building better APIs, lessening the strain on the Query Service, doing more outreach to developers as well as making our data more usable by ironing out ontology issues. In addition there will be increased focus on improving how the other Wikimedia projects integrate Wikidata. With the opening up of Wikibase Cloud we will hopefully also see many new Wikibases pop up that cover more specialized data or be used as playgrounds to prepare data for Wikidata. I am looking forward to a growing Wikibase Ecosystem and excited about more Linked Open Data becoming available to the world, with Wikidata being an entryway to it all.
And last but not least: if you want to learn a bit more about the history and backstory of Wikidata, then you might like Wikidata: The Making Of by Denny, Markus and me.
List of presents gathered by the community for Wikidata's eleventh birthday
Luthor is a multi-lingual tool for adding usage examples to lexemes on Wikidata, from sentences found on Wikisource in the same language. (by Asaf Bartov)
সংকলক একটি সরঞ্জাম যেটা দিয়ে উইকিসংকলনের লেখাগুলির উইকিউপাত্ত আইটেম অনুসারে সে লেখাগুলিকে উন্নত ভাবে অনুসন্ধান করা যায়। - Sangkalak is a tool with which Wikisource works can be searched more readily, using the Wikidata items for those works. (present from Mahir256) (by মাহির২৫৬-এর উপহার)
Creating new Lexemes? For a lot more languages you now no longer need to provide a spelling variant when creating a new Lexeme, making it even easier to contribute data about words in your language. (present from the development team)
The Mismatch Finder, the tool to help review mismatches between Wikidata and other data sources now also has support for mismatches on qualifiers. This allows it to be useful also for issues that are in the data in qualifiers. (present from the development team)
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call October 31, 2023: We will hear from Darnelle Melvin, Cory Lampert, and Andre Hulet, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Libraries, on WireframeVG: A Search and Discovery Application for Wikidata Projects. Agenda
How cultural institutions use Wikidata (How cultural heritage institutions sharing their collection data, including implementing Wikidata projects, batch uploading datasets to Wikidata, and how to share successes to a broader audience) - Jackie Rubashkin, Metadata Technician, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Michelle van Lanschot, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia-Netherlands; William Blueher, Associate Museum Librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Will Kent, Wiki Education
(in Chinese) Wikidata基礎編輯教學 (Wikidata basic editor) - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) 2023
Notable People is a map project by Topi Tjukanov that showing birthplaces of the most "notable people" around the world. It uses the combined data of Wikipedia and Wikidata from the paper's "a cross-verified database of notable people, 3500 BC-2018 AD" by Morgane Laouenan, Palaash Bhargava, Jean-Benoît Eyméoud, Olivier Gergaud, Guillaume Plique & Etienne Wasmer. The data shows only one person for each unique geographic location with the highest notability rank.
Wikimedia Research Fund Update update. "You can apply for research funds (USD 2K-50K) until December 15, 2023. While all research proposals related to Wikimedia projects are welcome, we particularly encourage research studies on medium to small size languages and communities, as well as in low resourced languages and projects."
The Wikidata For Wikimedia Projects team is investigating the different ways Wikidata is used in the sister projects. We would like to speak with you about your experiences integrating or connecting Wikidata, if you'd like to tell us, please sign up for an interview on our project page or on our Registration Form.
Wikidata:WikiProject Academic Publisher - a project to display open access shares (among others based on publishers) at the Austrian Datahub for Open Access Negotiations and Monitoring
Development
Wikibase REST API: We are continuing the work on making it possible to remove a description in a given language from an Item, modify the label of an Item and add aliases to an Item (phab:T342986, phab:T342980, phab:T335842)
Lexicographical data: We switched the Property that is used to pre-select the spelling variant on the Special:NewLexeme page from P218 (ISO 639-1 code) to P305 (IETF language tag) to make use of the latter’s larger coverage. (phab:T348923)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing to work on addressing the feedback from the testing of the new datatype in the test system.
Latest comment: 8 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Structured Content team, as part of its project of improving UploadWizard on Commons, made some UX improvements to the upload step of choosing own vs not own work (T347590), as well as to the licensing step for own work (T347756).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 November. It will be on all wikis from 2 November (calendar).
Listings on category pages are sorted on each wiki for that language using a library. For a brief period on 2 November, changes to categories will not be sorted correctly for many languages. This is because the developers are upgrading to a new version of the library. They will then use a script to fix the existing categories. This will take a few hours or a few days depending on how big the wiki is. You can read more. [373][374]
Starting November 1, the impact module (Special:Impact) will be upgraded by the Growth team. The new impact module shows newcomers more data regarding their impact on the wiki. It was tested by a few wikis during the last few months. [375]
Upcoming: Data Modelling Days, November 30-December 2. You can propose a session until November 19. If you are running another event or meetup and would like to connect it to the Data Modelling Days, you can add it to the satellite events section.
Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web is a collection of preceedings from the 5th Iberoamerican Conference and 4th Indo-American Conference, KGSWC 2023, Nov. 13–15. By F. Ortiz-Rodriguez, B. Villazón-Terrazas, S. Tiwari & C. Bobed.
linguistic family of place name (Relates directly a placename to its original language family. It's not the language in which the toponym is written, but the language from which the word (place name) comes from.)
according to (to be used together with P248 if the statement is taken from an aggregator rather than directly from the source)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold (alias: "item belonging to the subject class but not the value class"))
Newest WikiProjects: Source Reliability "is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources".
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We have implemented the endpoints for PATCH /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases (phab:T337371), PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/aliases (phab:T342982) and PATCH /entities/properties/{property_id}/labels (phab:T342980)
We started working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
Language codes:
We made Special:NewLexeme more likely to guess the spelling variant for you by changing the Property we use to get the language code. Now you will see the spelling variant input pop up less often. (phab:T349652)
We started work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Query Service UI: We’ve fixed a small issue in the Query Service UI that was introduced when updating CSS variables. Content of selected cells in the query result should be readable again. (phab:T350153)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, the default font-size of a number of navigational elements (tagline, tools menu, navigational links, and more) has been increased slightly to match the font size used in page content. [376]
Problems
Last week, there was a problem displaying some recent edits on a few wikis, for 1-6 hours. The edits were saved but not immediately shown. This was due to a database problem. [377]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 November. It will be on all wikis from 9 November (calendar).
The Growth team will reassign newcomers from former mentors to the currently active mentors. They have also changed the notification language to be more user-friendly. [378][379]
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: S8321414 (RfP scheduled to end after 13 November 2023 14:50 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot:
DiFoolBot 2 (Task: import VIAF ID based on Union List of Artist Names ID)
KizuleBot (Task: Adding sitelinks to Serbian Wikipedia for maintenance categories (see contributions of account) based on items for English Wikipedia's ones)
KormiSKbot (Task: Linking newly created pages on SKWiki to the appropriate Wikidata items.)
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 14, 2023: We will hear from Diego Saez-Trumper on Wikidata Revert Risk and Annotool. Agenda
Latin America in Wikidata Challenge (Spanish) < Nov. 14 - Dec. 14. Play the game and help highlight the region hosting the GLAM Wiki conference! (Prizes available).
Edit-a-thon "Women in sciences" < 17 Nov. 12:00 - 18 Nov. 03:00 (UTC). A live edit-a-thon to improve the quality and variety of articles of women who have won the prestigious L'Oréal-UNESCO National Award "For Women in Science". (Prizes available).
Language community meetings: A new initiative by WMF language team to organize quarterly gatherings to encourage collaboration among individuals and communities interested in language-related technical topics. First meeting: Friday, November 17, 2023, 16:00 to 17:00 (UTC)
Glam Wiki Program - 16 - 18 November, Montevideo, Uruguay. Want to attend in person? - Register here. Wikidata Related Sessions:
Knowledge Graphs - Foundations and Applications course by Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. October 11, 2023 - November 21, 2023. Enrol here if you have not done so yet.
GSOC ‘23: Automating Area Management in MusicBrainz <-- Prathamesh, in their Google Summer of Code project, developed a data pipeline to automate the synchronization of area metadata between MusicBrainz and Wikidata.
Papers
Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world <-- The project “Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research” aims to link museum authority data to Wikidata, enhancing the visibility, accessibility, and relevance of information across different museum collections, and encouraging cultural heritage institutions in Sweden to contribute to and utilize the Wikimedia platforms.
The 4th Wikidata Workshop for the scientific Wikidata community happened on 07 November 2023. You can find a full list of presented papers here
Videos
Connecting Entomological Collectors ECN2023 <-- A presentation for the Entomological Collections Network 2023 conference by Siobhan Leachman, this presentation explains how Wikidata can be used to create an identifier for entomological collectors, empowering the collation & linking of biographical data as well as the ability to link to other databases & catalogs relating to those collectors.
Wikidata projects in Wikimedia Spain <-- part of the online sessions organized by Wikimedia España to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Wikidata. In this session, Ángel Obregón, a member of Wikimedia España, presents some of the projects driven by Wikidata by the members of WMES.
Notebooks:
Subclass of... <-- Wikidata's ontology is complex. This tool aims at finding if an item is a subclass of another one.
The Wednesday Index <-- A longitudinal analysis of gender diversity in Wikipedia articles.
Tool of the week
OpenFlights.org is now getting some of its airline data from Wikidata. It is a free open-source tool that allows you to log, map, calculate, and share your flights and trips.
WikiProject IDEA - This Wikiproject serves as a working group and process documentation archive for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a project generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and in development at Bard College and Yale University.
WikiProject Interwiki - The goal of this project is linking Wikidata items with wiki articles outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Niche wikis frequently offer more in-depth content compared to general online dictionary articles, although their quality can vary significantly.
WikiProject SrpKor - The main aim of this project is building Wikidata entities for the novels from SrpKor: Corpus of the contemporary Serbian language.
WikiProject Echinodermata - A repository for information pertaining to the NSF Grant Echinoderm Project.
Development
Wikibase REST API: We continued working on the new endpoints for POST /entities/items/{item_id}/aliases/{language_code} (phab:T335842) and DELETE /entities/items/{item_id}/descriptions/{lang_code} (phab:T342986)
EntitySchemas: We are continuing the work on the new data type for linking to EntitySchemas, working on overcoming architectural issues.
Language codes: We continued work towards allowing many more languages by default for Wikibase Lexeme and monolingual text statements. This will remove the need for a lot of requests for new language codes to be added. (phab:T341409)
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Last week, users who previously visited Meta-Wiki or Wikimedia Commons and then became logged out on those wikis could not log in again. The problem is now resolved. [384]
Last week, some pop-up dialogs and menus were shown with the wrong font size. The problem is now resolved. [385]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 November. It will be on all wikis from 16 November (calendar).
Future changes
Reference Previews are coming to many wikis as a default feature. They are popups for references, similar to the PagePreviews feature. You can opt out of seeing them. If you are using the gadgets Reference Tooltips or Navigation Popups, you won’t see Reference Previews. Deployment is planned for November 22, 2023.
Canary (also known as heartbeat) events will be produced into Wikimedia event streams from December 11. Streams users are advised to filter out these events, by discarding all events where meta.domain == "canary". Updates to Pywikibot or wikimedia-streams will discard these events by default. [386]
Data Modelling Days, from November 30th to December 2nd: 3 days of online events to address data modelling challenges, discuss how to improve the way we structure data together, and discover the point of view of external reusers. Feel free to have a look at the program (under construction) and to sign up as a participant.
Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour November 20th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to. The seventh Wikidata Working Hour will cover the Author Disambiguator tool, which helps users assign authors to articles.During the session we will demonstrate how to use the tool on an author who was created during a previous working hour, and another who doesn't exist in Wikidata yet. After the demonstration, participants are encouraged to try the tool themselves during the rest of the working hour. This session will build on the work done in previous Working Hours by connecting authors to the articles they have written. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
ItWikiCon '23 (Italian) was hosted in Bari, Italy between the 17th - 19th November. Check the Programme for details on sessions and check for recordings or slidedecks of presentations.
GLAM Wiki 2023 took place in Montevideo, Uruguay. There were several Wikidata-related sessions some of which are linked in the Videos section.
Can you trust Wikidata? - is a paper exploring Wikidata's veracity and trustability for providing values to Knowledge Graphs. Written by V. Santos et al.
User-level gender statistics for Wikipedia - a tool that computes the number of articles created by gender has been repaired after some months of unavailability. It relies on xtools and P21 property.
Luthor - tool for finding usage examples from Wikisource and adding them to lexemes on Wikidata.
WikiProject Manuscripts - This WikiProject coordinates efforts on Wikidata to gather and curate structured data on manuscripts.
WikiProject Grove Hall Black Women Lead - aims to shed light on the lives and stories of Black women leaders who have shaped Boston’s history from the colonial era to the present day.
Newest database reports: User:Pasleim/projectmerge/enwiki-svwiki - 3875 merge candidates in English Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia based on same sitelink name.
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [387][388]
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Quechua Wikipedia, Romansh Wikipedia, Romani Wikipedia, Rundi Wikipedia, Aromanian Wikipedia, Tarandíne Wikipedia, Rusyn Wikipedia, Kinyarwanda Wikipedia, Sanskrit Wikipedia, Sakha Wikipedia, Santali Wikipedia, Sardinian Wikipedia, Sicilian Wikipedia, Scots Wikipedia, Sindhi Wikipedia, Northern Sami Wikipedia, Sango Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, Sinhala Wikipedia, Slovak Wikipedia, Slovenian Wikipedia, Samoan Wikipedia, Somali Wikipedia, Albanian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Sranan Tongo Wikipedia, Swati Wikipedia, Southern Sotho Wikipedia, Saterland Frisian Wikipedia, Sundanese Wikipedia, Silesian Wikipedia, Tamil Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tetum Wikipedia, Tajik Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkmen Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia, Tswana Wikipedia, Tongan Wikipedia, Tok Pisin Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Tsonga Wikipedia, Tatar Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia, Tahitian Wikipedia, Tuvinian Wikipedia, Udmurt Wikipedia, Uyghur Wikipedia, Uzbek Wikipedia, Venda Wikipedia, Venetian Wikipedia, Veps Wikipedia, West Flemish Wikipedia, Volapük Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [389][390][391]
The Vector 2022 skin will have some minor visual changes to drop-down menus, column widths, and more. These changes were added to four Wikipedias last week. If no issues are found, these changes will proceed to all wikis this week. These changes will make it possible to add new menus for readability and dark mode. Learn more. [392]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call November 28, 2023: As a satellite event for Data Modeling Days, we will facilitate community discussion around data modeling in Wikidata for library collections in a variety of formats, including people, books, serials, scholarly articles, rare materials, music, media, and realia. Agenda
Linked Open Data and Wikidata < Alan Ang (WMDE) talks about the importance of Linked Open Data and forming mutually beneficial partnerships between the Foundation and Institutions.
Notebooks
Explore new ways of visualising your data with a Circular Dendrogam, illustrated here with Association Football players broken down by Country and Team.
Tool of the week
Harvest Templates - is a tool that helps transfer data from Wikimedia projects to Wikidata.
User:MichaelSchoenitzer/Updown - is a userscript used for faster navigation. If there are a lot of values for one property it will add arrows that allow you to jump to the first/last value.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE is researching ways to improve the editing experience in different languages and would love to hear your feedback. We would like to talk to a few of you in online interviews to learn about your experiences, expectations, and concerns. Please let us know in this sign-up form if you are interested in taking part.
The Research team at WMF is running a second labeling campaign to evaluate the Revert Risk model for Wikidata. This is part of ongoing work on creating a new generation of Machine Learning models to support patrolling work on Wikimedia projects. Please help by going to this link, and labeling each revision in one of these three categories: Keep, Not Sure, Revert. Notice that "Not Sure" should be used in all cases where the Keep or Revert labels are not clear to you.
COR SEM (The Danish central word registry identifier)
UPOC ({{TranslateThis
| de = Ist eine eindeutige id zur Identifizierung von Organisationen/Sendungen/... zu einem Dienstleister.
<!-- | xx = Beschreibungen in anderen Sprachen -->
}})
WikiProject Heritage Collections - The aim of the present project is to create the world’s most comprehensive high quality database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Events and Role Frames - The primary aims of WikiProject Events and Role Frames is to define a set of properties that consistently model event occurrences and their participants; to fill gaps in Wikidata regarding items for events and actions; and to encourage use of the proposed model and newly introduced items across Wikidata.
We continued to make a lot more language codes available (phab:341409)
EntitySchemas: We are experimenting with how to work around some technical blockers for the new datatype
Wikibase REST API: We've been working on the ability to remove an Item's label in a specific language and modify the descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981, phab:T342981)
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [393][394]
MediaWiki's JavaScript system will now allow async/await syntax in gadgets and user scripts. Gadget authors should remember that users' browsers may not support it, so it should be used appropriately. [395]
The deployment of "Add a link" announced last week was postponed. It will resume this week.
Around 250 war-threatened architectural monuments documented (German) - Wikidata, Wikibase and Commons are helping preserve and plan the restoration of culturally-significant Monuments damaged or destroyed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
ZotWb < export records in a Zotero group library to a custom Wikibase, prepare datasets to send to OpenRefine, feed OpenRefine reconciliaton results back to the Wikibase. Wikidata is envolved in the entity reconciliation. Here's a short explanation and demo video Tool is written and provided by David Lindermann with support from WMF Rapid Grant.
Montana Plant Life URL (URL for a plant family, genus, or species on the Montana Plant Life website)
event role (item that describes a role in an event class)
role in event (event class for which the item describes a role)
selectional preference ((to be used only with the subclasses of Q_event_role) an item that plays this role in an event instance should descend from this item via a combination of P31 and P279)
event arguments and types (item that plays a role in an event instance; used with a qualifier "argument type")
BnF archives and manuscripts ID (identifier for a manuscript in the archives and manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Do not include the initial "cc")
clerked for (this person has held a clerkship with the judge)
battery life (the length of time a device can continue to work before it needs its battery to be recharged)
Showcase Lexemes: läsa - 'read' about this Swedish word with many pronounciations and grammatical features.
Feel free to suggest next week's Showcase Item and Lexeme!
Development
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the endpoint for removing an Item's label in a specific language (phab:T335841) and the endpoint for modifying descriptions on a Property (phab:T342981)
We are working on the endpoint for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on moving the tool over to the new design system Codex
We adjusted the styling for the values of monolingual text statements to make the language easier to distinguish from the value (phab:T280774)
mul language code: We made some final adjustments to get it ready for testing.
Lexemes: We are adding a license note for anon users when editing a Lexeme’s lemma, a Form or Sense (phab:T343999)
Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The spacing between paragraphs on Vector 2022 has been changed from 7px to 14px to match the size of the text. This will make it easier to distinguish paragraphs from sentences. [396]
The "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is working again. You no longer need to switch to source editing to edit {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords. [397]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [398][399]
Registration & Scholarship applications are now open for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 that will take place from 3–5 May in Tallinn, Estonia. Scholarship applications are open until 5 January 2024.
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New requests for permissions/Bot: LccnBot (Task: Adds P244 to bibliographic entities base on library authority records.)
New request for comments: Duplicate References Data Model and UI < During Data Modelling Days '23, 2 proposals emerged trying to answer the question of how to handle duplicate References on Wikidata Items.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call December 12, 2023: Several members of the Chinese Culture and Heritage Wikidata group will provide an overview of the group's Wikidata projects as well as the challenges they have encountered. Agenda
Data-SHS Bordeaux Week: Processing and Analyzing Quantitative Data in Human and Social Sciences 2023. Dec. 11 - 15, Bordeaux, FR.
OpenRefine - a open source tool for working with data < This session explores the advantages of using OR to wrangle, clean, transform and standardise data for Wikidata. Presented by Jinoy Tom Jacob at the IndiaFOSS3.0 Conference.
QLever SPARQl Engine < If you attended Data Modeling Days '23, you may have seen an extraordinary Session given by Hannah Bast and Johannes Kalmbach showcasing the power and advantages of the QLever engine. QLever can handle queries that cause the WDQS to timeout or allowing Federated queries and Geospatial!
(QLEver has already featured in Tool of the Week but we wanted to showcase it again after experiencing it at DMD '23)
counterexample (qualifier for deprecated P279 statements; example instance or subclass of the item class for which a "subclass of" statement does not hold)
WikiProject Heritage Collections: database of archival fonds and heritage collections (including contemporary scientific collections or documentation holdings) and to ensure the interlinking of respective catalogues, finding aids, or collection databases with Wikidata.
WikiProject Source Reliability: is an effort to identify and aggregate online sources of assessments of the reliability and credibility of sources.
Wikibase REST API: We continued work on the routes for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
Monolingual text values can now use many more languages than before. We’re still working on doing the same for Lexemes. (phab:T341409)
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
On Wikimedia Commons, there are some minor user-interface improvements for the "choosing own vs not own work" step in the UploadWizard. This is part of the Structured Content team's project of improving UploadWizard on Commons. [401][402]
Problems
There was a problem showing the Newcomer homepage feature with the "impact module" and their page-view graphs, for a few days in early December. This has now been fixed. [403][404]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 December. It will be on all wikis from 14 December (calendar). [405][406]
Future changes
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 5 January 2024, and has an associated privacy statement.
Latest comment: 6 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Tech News
The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 8 January 2024 because of the holidays.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 December. It will be on all wikis from 21 December (calendar). There is no new MediaWiki version next week. [407][408]
Starting December 18, it won't be possible to activate Structured Discussions on a user's own talk page using the Beta feature. The Beta feature option remains available for users who want to deactivate Structured Discussions. This is part of Structured Discussions' deprecation work. [409]
There will be full support for redirects in the Module namespace. The "Move Page" feature will leave an appropriate redirect behind, and such redirects will be appropriately recognized by the software (e.g. hidden from Special:UnconnectedPages). There will also be support for manual redirects. [410]
Future changes
The MediaWiki JavaScript documentation is moving to a new format. During the move, you can read the old docs using version 1.41. Feedback about the new site is welcome on the project talk page.
The Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The first community Wishathon will take place from 15–17 March. If you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you can register for the event and read more.
Other discussions: How to handle concepts of trans people on Wikidata? Should {privacy at wikidata.org} be redirected to {privacy at wikimedia.org} or should it be monitored by Wikidata volunteers? Join the discussion!
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Working Hour December 18th, 2023: Over the summer and into the fall the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group will be offering a series of Wikidata Working Hours to give folks an opportunity to try out various Wikidata-related skills and tools by assembling a data set of diverse library and information science (LIS) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata. Wikidata Working Hours provide hands-on Wikidata experience in a supportive space. We hope you will join us if you are interested in learning more about Wikidata, exploring LIS literature, and have been looking for a fun Wikidata project to contribute to.The ninth and final Wikidata Working Hour in the series will be using SPARQL and Scholia to query and visualize the data we’ve added to Wikidata during our series. This session will be recorded and the recording shared on the event page
Blogs: #LD42023. Part I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop) - This blog series explores how libraries engage with Wikidata and Linked Data in the face of AI challenges. Led by Silvia Gutiérrez and Giovanna Fontenelle from the Wikimedia Foundation, the series summarizes insights from a collaborative session at the 2023 LD4 Conference, using Design Thinking strategies to connect the Library-Wikidata community with WMF, focusing on Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. By Silvia Gutiérrez & Giovanna Fontenelle
Papers
Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review - This review analyzes Wikipedia's gender gap from 2007 to 2022, revealing a slight majority of female authors, addressing key themes, and exploring strategies to mitigate the gap, providing valuable insights into the research landscape in this domain. By Núria Ferran-Ferrer, Juan-José Boté-Vericad and Julia Minguillón.
Ten years of Wikidata: A bibliometric study - This research delves into scholarly publications about Wikidata from its inception in 2012 to late 2022, revealing 945 relevant papers, primarily from conferences. The analysis highlights a concentration of experts and contributors from the Global North, as well as governmental institutions as predominant funders. The study calls for enhanced networking and outreach to promote diversity and inclusion within the Wikidata research community. Emphasizing computer science perspectives, the research focuses on methods for developing and utilizing open knowledge graphs, notably Wikidata, with a narrower but significant interest in application-oriented studies in digital humanities, biology, and healthcare. (Turki, et al)
Videos
Duplicating Everywhere All at Once | Cebuano Wikipedia - Five years ago, Lsjbot's Wikipedia articles caused duplicate Wikidata items, notably impacting geographic places on Cebuano Wikipedia. This video by User:Canley at Wikimania 2023 delves into the history, visualizes the issue, and suggests cleanup strategies for Wikidata and Wikipedia, emphasizing Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of Australia, with implications for the global challenge of bot-created duplicates.
Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research with Alicia Fagerving - Alicia Fagerving, Wikimedia Sverige, introduces the project "Useful Authorities for Data-Driven Collection Research" and Wikidata. The project, spanning 2021-2023, links vocabularies from the databases of Nationalmuseum and Statens historiska museer to Wikidata, exploring it as a platform for semantic interoperability among cultural heritage institutions and providing tools and visualizations for similar projects.
2023: OSM-Wikidata Map Framework. Combining OpenStreetMap and Wikidata allows to leverage the strengths of the two projects to create richer maps. This talk explores how OSM-Wikidata Map Framework simplifies this process. By Daniele Santini
It's not bad! Measuring Gérard Depardieu's mark on French cinema (in French) - The analysis centers on Gérard Depardieu's impact on French cinema amid legal issues and sexual assault allegations. Despite difficulties in addressing these accusations, the author leverages Wikidata to measure Depardieu's influence by querying films from directors born after 1930 to assess his involvement.
How to Become a Billionaire: A Billionaire's Occupations Network Analysis - This network analysis investigates billionaires’ primary sources of income with a network graph—based on their occupations—connecting billionaires from all over the world and uncovering some of the biggest industries in the world.
Drama Corpora Project (DraCor) is a digital database of plays, primarily from Europe. It collects and organizes texts of plays in a way that allows researchers and others to extract and analyze information from those texts. This could include details about the characters, the dialogue, the stage directions, and more. The data is being pulled from Wikidata.
We finished adding the endpoints for adding aliases in a given language for a Property (phab:T343721) and removing a Property's label in a given language (phab:T342983)
We started working on the endpoint for removing a Property's description in a given language (phab:T342985)
We are fixing an issue with incorrect handling of lowercase statement IDs in edit requests (phab:T352644)
Special:PrefixIndex now shows label/lemma for Properties and Lexemes (phab:T343115)
Language codes: We changed where Wikidata is getting its languages from for Lexemes and Monolingual text statements and thereby resolved many tasks requesting another language being added to them (phab:T341409)
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Welcome to 2023’s Final Weekly Summary!
A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the newsletter this year!👏🙏 As we step into 2024, we'd love to hear what changes you would like to see in the newsletter. Share your wishlist here: What changes would you like to see in the newsletter in 2024?"
Discussions
Open request for adminship: EPIC (RfP scheduled to end after 26 December 2023 20:34 UTC)
New requests for permissions/Bot: Balyozbot. Tasks:
Import sitelinks, labels, descriptions from ku wikipedia pages which use the template w:ku:Template:Înterwîkî etîket û danasîn. (There are over 1800 articles that use this template waiting to be connected to Wikidata at the moment.)
Add sitelinks to kuwiktionary / kuwikipedia categories / create an item for the category if necessary. I have been doing this manually for quite some time using Quickstatements but since I need to get permission for the first task, I will be handling them using a bot as well.
Upcoming: Introducing WMF Wishathon for Wikimedia’s Community Wishlist! "focused on bringing together people who already contribute to technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, who know how to find their way on the technical ecosystem, and who are able to work or collaborate on projects rather autonomously." March 15th to 17th, 2024.
African Librarians empowered to share knowledge and enhance information visibility through AfLIA Wikidata Online Course --> The "Promoting Open Knowledge Practices in African Libraries through Wikidata" project, executed by AfLIA with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, trained African librarians on using Wikidata to enhance the visibility of library collections and close the knowledge and gender gap on Africa. The course was facilitated by experienced African Wikimedian editors and included diverse strategies for learner engagement and support.
Papers: Increasing Coverage and Precision of Textual Information in Multilingual Knowledge Graphs by (Conia et al, 2023) --> This paper introduces a novel task of automatic Knowledge Graph Enhancement (KGE) to bridge the gap in the quantity and quality of textual information between English and non-English languages in Wikidata. It presents M-NTA, an unsupervised approach that combines Machine Translation, Web Search, and Large Language Models to generate high-quality textual information, and studies its impact on Entity Linking, Knowledge Graph Completion, and Question Answering tasks.
Videos
Wikidata, Wikisource and Wiktionary: Wikisource for DH (WiSe 2023) --> The lecture "Fundamentals and application-oriented methods of the Digital Humanities" by Kay-Michael Würzner is designed as a series of lectures in which teachers in the "Digital Humanities" course present their fields of work and key topics and present them for discussion.
Empowering Open-Source Generative AI by Integrating the Wikidata knowledge graph --> Generative AI has changed the information ecosystem, and open-source knowledge graphs like Wikidata can become invaluable assets, propelling a myriad of applications forward. Jonathan Fraine & Lydia Pintscher present the practical integration of Wikidata's open-source, open-access knowledge graph to empower Generative AI applications. Harnessing the real-time updated, structured data encapsulated within Wikidata, they explore automated content creation, data augmentation, and semantic analysis, underpinning the generative paradigms. Through a blend of theoretical insights and real-world applications, they elucidate how to leverage Wikidata to elevate generative AI applications, breaking down existing data silos, and fostering a collaborative ecosystem within our global community of developers and contributors.
Wiki Indaba 2023 - African content on Wikidata --> Discussion with Alice Kibombo, Georges Fodouop and Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi, about Wikidata for African Librarians during the Wiki Indaba conference, that took place between 3-5 November 2023 in Agadir, Morocco.
No Time to Wait - S07E10 - ACMI // Wikidata - Paul Duchesne + Simon Loffler --> Report on recent residency program to extensively link together collection data from ACMI with Wikidata. This work has allowed the organisation to import vast quantities of data and media to enrich their own internet collection experience, as well enable writing information back to source and federating with other linked institutions.
Map of K-Pop Idols --> An interactive map where each red dot represents a K-pop Idol (a singer or musician in South Korean Pop music) you are able to click on.
Disney as the Mega Corporation it is Today --> Disney has greatly evolved from the simple animation company that first debuted in 1923 with its signature Steamboat Willie animation. This analysis details some of the major acquisitions Disney has chosen to help expand its reach as a media and entertainment company.
State of statues in the US --> Map of how many statues there are, who is depicted in the statues, their genders, and where the statues are concentrated.
An Analysis on Nepo Babies: Net Worths and Fame --> This work uses Wikidata to analyze the influence and success of children of famous actors (nepo babies) in the entertainment industry, and compares the careers and net worth of these children with their parents to understand the impact of nepotism on their success.
Tool of the week
Cersei - is a tool designed for importing or scraping data from various third-party sources, using source-specific Python code. It can use a "headless browser" to scrape complicated websites that rely on eg JavaScript to navigate. It can therefore access data sources that can not be accessed via eg Mix'n'match. The data from sources can be updated regularly, either for everything, or just changed entries (if the source has a "recent changes" equivalent).
Wikidata:Zotero/Cita - is a Wikidata addon for Zotero that adds citations (i.e., what other items an item cites) metadata support to this open source reference management software, using cites work (P2860) information available from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data.
production manager (manager that is responsible for the administration of a feature film or television production; oversees production plans, controls resources, initiates production, ensures ongoing operations, monitors schedules and expenditures, and creates a detailed production schedule and budget)
Newest WikiProjects: WikiProject Städel Museum Wikidata Clean-Up - This WikiProject from the Städel Museum aims to actively participate in the Wikimedia community by maintaining and updating the quality of its data. This includes their collection of public domain art, which has been digitized and made freely available for public use. The project focuses on ensuring that the most current and high-quality data, including high-resolution images and improved metadata, are available on platforms like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 17:00 UTC, 17th January 2023 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Papers: Improving maintenance of community-based knowledge graphs. This paper by Nicolas Ferranti addresses the critical issue of data quality in open knowledge graphs, with a specific focus on Wikidata. It aims to formalize Wikidata's unique approaches to assess and resolve data inconsistencies, proposing a semi-automatic refinement pipeline to empower the Wikidata user community in maintaining and enhancing the reliability of this extensive collaborative knowledge graph.
Videos: WikidataCon 2023 Day 1.5 - The past and future of Wikidata. In this video Lydia Pintscher takes a moment to review the major events of Wikidata over the past few years. Then turns to look forward and predict what Wikidata's prospects will be over the next year.
Tool of the week
WICA: Wikidata's insights for created articles is an updated version of an old tool. It now includes many new features to analyse your list of created articles using Wikidata properties.
Nonprofit Status (Indicating the legal and tax status of a non-profit organization (specific to served legal areas, aka. Countries). Addition to {{P|1454}}. {{P|1628}} to [https://schema.org/nonprofitStatus nonprofitStatus] from schema.org. Organizations can have multiple Nonprofit Status from different countries.)
creative director (person who makes high-level creative decisions, oversees the creation of creative assets such as adverts, products, events or logos and guides and directs the creative people who create the end result)
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Blogs: PubChem on Wikidata – What is the state of coverage? by Tiago Lubiana. In summary, Wikidata has good coverage of the structured chemical data in PubChem, though there are improvement points. PubChem displays, and will always display, textual information and vendor-specific data that do not fit Wikidata, but they are complementary tools in the ecosystem of open chemical data.
LIS Journals’ Lack of Participation in Wikidata Item Creation by Eric Willey & Susan Radovsky, discusses the gap of Wikidata items being created for scholarly articles by the scholar's themselves and if this can lead to inconsistent or inaccurate data model.
Quantifying Americanization: Coverage of American Topics in Different Wikipedias: this paper asks whether there is an americanisation bias in the content created by the communities. By Piotr Konieczny & Włodzimierz Lewoniewski.
Videos
Map Kerala Initiative is an opendata portal geospatial map powered by Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, introduced by Manoj Karingamadathil.
Notebooks: Wikipedia article as a timeline - This tool transforms a Wikipedia article in a timeline by parsing all internal links in a Wikipedia article and retrieving the date corresponding to each internal link using the point in time (P585) property in Wikidata.
Tool of the week Map your list of created articles - a notebook display of geolocated articles on a map created by a user per chosen project and batch (featured/good article).
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Deutschland ended their partnership within the project Software Collaboration for Wikidata prematurely. Read their joint statement here.
IP masking/temporary accounts: We are adjusting Wikibase to be prepared for the upcoming changes to no longer expose IP addresses for non-logged-in users (phab:T351968)
Dumps/lex. data: We’re adjusting how empty lists of Forms and Senses are represented in JSON dumps (phab:T305660)
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the work on making it possible to get all sitelinks of an Item (phab:T344041)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
mediawiki2latex is a tool that converts wiki content into the formats of LaTeX, PDF, ODT, and EPUB. The code now runs many times faster due to recent improvements. There is also an optional Docker container you can install on your local machine.
The way that Random pages are selected has been updated. This will slowly reduce the problem of some pages having a lower chance of appearing. [411]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 January. It will be on all wikis from 11 January (calendar). [412][413]
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
New request for comments: Community request for the development team to access inverse properties on client wikis. (Summary: We currently cannot access inverse property values on Wikipedia. This can be a data management issue on Wikipedia as we must always ask ourself if we must introduce an inverse property for cases where we need them. So I think it’s useful to gather the usecases community would want and draft a request for an API to the devteam to do that.)
Upcoming: The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday, 16:00 UTC on Wednesday, 17th January 2024 (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. The Wikidata and Wikibase office hours are online events where the development team presents what they have been working on over the past quarter, and the community is welcome to ask questions and discuss important issues related to the development of Wikidata and Wikibase.
Past
Provenance Loves Wiki (PLW24), Jan 12th - 14th, research and data on the origin of artworks and cultural heritage and how Wikibase and Wikidata can support this.
WikiLovesWomen #SheSaid campaign wrapped up the 2023 campaign by visiting Kinshasha and Kisangani, where local Wikimedians improved quotes from women on FR Wikipedia and Wikidata.
QLever: a new way to query OpenStreetMap --> Discussion of the new opportunities offered by QLever to query OpenStreetMap and to run federated queries with Wikidata
Wikidata for authority control: 3 years of work --> The three-year Wikidata for authority control project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Sverige and Swedish museums, concluded in December 2023. It equipped museum staff with tools and skills to integrate their authority databases with Wikidata, resulting in added identifiers, SPARQL query proficiency, and enhanced knowledge sharing within the GLAM sector.
Go-ahead for Wikidata Project of GLAM institutions from Baden-Württemberg --> The GLAM-BW project, under "GLAM goes OpenData," connects major collections in Baden-Württemberg, focusing on the württembergische Kunstkammer. With over 3,000 objects, the project integrates information on collectors, histories, and objects into a knowledge graph for semantic searches, contributing to the broader realm of linked open data, akin to Wikidata.
Swiss GLAM Programme --> Wikimedia CH imported the Museum of Natural History of Neuchâtel's urchin fossil casts to Wikimedia Commons, connecting structured data on Wikidata. The project involved data cleaning, adding missing elements, and file imports via OpenRefine, highlighting seamless integration between Wikidata and Commons.
Papers
Reflections on the PCC Wikidata Pilot at UCLA Library: --> Undertaking the PCC Learning Objectives. Discusses the 14-month Pilot programme for cooperative cataloguing of UCLA Library and Museum Collections. By E. Zhang, P. Biswas & I. Dagher.
SMWCon 2023: Semantics, Wikis, and AI --> Day 1, Keynote by Prof. Markus Krötzsch who explores origins and principles of semantic wikis and key challenges that lie ahead in managing knowledge.
Brian M Sperlongano released US boundary QA checker, a quality assurance tool for finding issues with boundary data in the United States by using Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and US Census Bureau data.
The Surrounding Ocean (available at vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean) - is a tool that allows you to browse lexicographical data. You can use the tool to explore words and their meanings, translations, and synonyms. The tool is currently under development, and the developer, Danny, would appreciate feedback to fix any issues with the tool. More info: Wikidata:The Surrounding Ocean.
WikiProject Highlights: Ontology Cleaning Task Force: A group of people have started a task force to discuss problems with the Wikidata ontology and how to clean them up. Anyone interested in participating is welcome. The task force maintains Wikidata:WikiProject Ontology/Cleaning Task Force as a record of its activities. You can add yourself to the participants list there and find out how to join group meetings or otherwise participate in the group. (Got something noteworthy happening in your WikiProject? Share it in the upcoming issue!)
IP masking: We are working on adjusting Wikibase to handle the upcoming introduction of IP masking, which will give editors who are not logged in a temporary account name instead of using their IP to attribute edits to (phab:T351968)
Lexicographical data: We are changing how empty Senses and Forms are represented in the dumps (phab:T305660)
mul language code: We are doing user testing for the current implementation to see if it is understandable for people.
Mismatch Finder: We are continuing the work on migrating it to the Codex design system.
REST API:
We improved the handling of lower-case statement IDs (phab:T354262)
We are working on getting a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344039)
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Pages that use the JSON contentmodel will now use tabs instead of spaces for auto-indentation. This will significantly reduce the page size. [414]
Gadgets and personal user scripts may now use JavaScript syntax introduced in ES6 (also known as "ES2015") and ES7 ("ES2016"). MediaWiki validates the source code to protect other site functionality from syntax errors, and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. Previously, Gadgets could use the requiresES6 option. This option is no longer needed and will be removed in the future. [415]
An update on the status of the Community Wishlist Survey for 2024 has been published. Please read and give your feedback.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 January. It will be on all wikis from 18 January (calendar). [418][419]
Starting on January 17, it will not be possible to login to Wikimedia wikis from some specific old versions of the Chrome browser (versions 51–66, released between 2016 and 2018). Additionally, users of iOS 12, or Safari on Mac OS 10.14, may need to login to each wiki separately. [420]
The jquery.cookie module was deprecated and replaced with the mediawiki.cookie module last year. A script has now been run to replace any remaining uses, and this week the temporary alias will be removed. [421]
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for comments: Domain name as data (Summary: How should Wikidata store the domain name associated with an item? There are many properties for URLs, but a domain name is a different value.)
PLW 2024: Provenance loves Wiki - Fri. 12th - Sun. 14th January. If you missed the event, catch up by reading the slides, Notes and watching the recordings on the Project page
Next: Linked Open Data in Heritage Workshop > Jan. 23rd, 13:00 - 15:00 CET. If you are in the Maastricht University Faculty and want to know enhance heritage research, improve data management, connectivity and visualisation, register for the Workshop.
AskWikidata: Natural language queries to Wikidata, a naive prototype created by Senior Software Engineer for Wikidata, Robert Timm. Want to try? (Google Colab)
IP Masking: We are continuing to adapt Wikibase to the upcoming IP Masking feature. We worked on hiding warnings about IP addresses being saved when they don’t apply (phab:T353807, phab:T352006) and creating temporary accounts when editing (phab:T354730)
Wikibase REST API:
We continued working on the ability to get a sitelink for a given site (phab:T344039)
We started working on the ability to remove a sitelink for a given wiki (phab:T344685)
We worked on fixing a bug where the REST API PUT request does not handle statement on Items with lowercase statement IDs (phab:T352644)
mul language code: We did user testing to find any remaining issue before release
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
A bug in UploadWizard prevented linking to the userpage of the uploader when uploading. It has now been fixed. [422]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 January. It will be on all wikis from 25 January (calendar). [423][424]
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: ROBERTSHST requested adminship to be able to link protected Wikipedia pages to Wikidata. The request has been denied and closed.
New request for comments: Frettiebot block? - Bovlb has requested community input about the edit behaviour of this bot, with more discussion found on the Frettiebot Discussion page.
Press, articles, blog posts, videos
Books: Banned books, Wikipedia and Wikidata - Volume 54, Number 2, 2023 of the focus on International Library and Information Work. Professor Núria Ferran of Women and Wikipedia.
Papers
Assisted Knowledge Graph Authoring: Human-Supervised Knowledge Graph Construction from Natural Language - a Web app allowing domain experts to create natural language Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. By Gohsen & Stein (2024).
Narrowing the Knowledge Evaluation Gap: Open-Domain Question Answering with Multi-Granularity Answers - evaluating predicted answers against a set of multi-granularity answers based on Wikidata. By Yona et al, (2024).
Videos
Introduction to Wikidata Query Tool - Learn A Wiki Skill (LAWS). If you are a Wikidata beginner, enjoy this video provided by Open Foundation West Africa.
Notebooks: GLAM2: Geolocated and Labeled Articles Map - much like the previously shared GLAM1 visually representing distribution of Good & Featured Articles but in a different visualisation.
The Wikidata Development team needs your feedback! We are currently evaluating a new feature for the Wikidata Query Service. Fancy sharing your thoughts? We would greatly appreciate it if you could complete this survey on Lamapoll. It should take you around 10–15 minutes. Your input means a lot to us. Thank you!
Wikidata:WikiProject IBC 2024 - The International Botanical Congress (IBC) takes place once every six years. The organisers of this WikiProject see this conference as an ideal opportunity to engage with the wider botanical community, educate them about the potential of Wikidata and to train them in its use. We will also use this opportunity to improve the data held in Wikidata about the participants, presenters and their contributions to botany.
WikiProject Health Data Space - This project is about organising data related to health data spaces, in particular the efforts to create a European Health Data Space. Initially it will focus on Sweden.
Showcase Lexemes: šťastný (L204262) (Czech) - having luck, fortune, happy. This is our first Czech showcase lexeme and it just so happens to be the largest Lexeme on Wikidata!
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [425]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [426][427]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [429]
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Starting Monday January 29, all talk pages messages' timestamps will become a link. This link is a permanent link to the comment. It allows users to find the comment they are looking for, even if this comment was moved elsewhere. This will affect all wikis except for the English Wikipedia. You can read more about this change on Diff or on Mediawiki.org. [430]
There are some improvements to the CAPTCHA to make it harder for spam bots and scripts to bypass it. If you have feedback on this change, please comment on the task. Staff are monitoring metrics related to the CAPTCHA, as well as secondary metrics such as account creations and edit counts.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 January. It will be on all wikis from 1 February (calendar). [431][432]
Gadgets which only work in some skins have sometimes used the targets option to limit where you can use them. This will stop working this week. You should use the skins option instead. [434]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 6, 2024: Wikimedia user Dnshitobu will discuss Wikidata for Education, the Dagbani NLP project, and the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group/sister communities. In the last part of the meeting, Dnshitobu will lead a discussion of your ideas for Wikidata Affinity Group activities in 2024 using Jamboard. Agenda
Wikidata 101 is a clinic, part of the #LoveDataWeek hosted at Toronto Metropolitan University; February 13th 11:00 - 12:30 EST in LIB 387 - Library Collaboratory building.
Connecting People, Connecting Archives Project (CACP) – Wikidata Workshop (Arabic). Archivists and scholars collaborated to align objectives and methods for the Connecting Archives Connecting People (CACP) Project. The aim of the workshop was to understand biographical data in archives.
Wikibase SPARQL Demo A live demo of the SPARQL MediaWiki extension during the February 2024 Wikibase Stakeholder Group meetup.
We are finishing the endpoint for adding/replacing a sitelink on an Item for a given wiki (phab:T342987) and have finished the ones for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685)
We have documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
We fixed the bug where sitelink data was not including badges even when available (phab:T355293)
IP masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase so we don't show IP addresses for non-logged-in users.
mul: We finished the user testing and will now work on the remaining blockers for the first release.
Latest comment: 5 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile site history pages now use the same HTML as the desktop history pages. If you hear of any problems relating to mobile history usage please point them to the phabricator task.
On most wikis, admins can now block users from making specific actions. These actions are: uploading files, creating new pages, moving (renaming) pages, and sending thanks. The goal of this feature is to allow admins to apply blocks that are adequate to the blocked users' activity. Learn more about "action blocks". [435][436]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 February. It will be on all wikis from 8 February (calendar). [437][438]
Talk pages permalinks that included diacritics and non-Latin script were malfunctioning. This issue is fixed. [439]
Future changes
24 Wikipedias with Reference Tooltips as a default gadget are encouraged to remove that default flag. This would make Reference Previews the new default for reference popups, leading to a more consistent experience across wikis. For 46 Wikipedias with less than 4 interface admins, the change is already scheduled for mid-February, unless there are concerns. The older Reference Tooltips gadget will still remain usable and will override this feature, if it is available on your wiki and you have enabled it in your settings. [440][441]
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
New request for permissions/Bot:
CJMBot - let users upload a CSV file in a certain format. The data inside is validated and processed, creating new items or updating existing items by adding statements and references.
Love Data Week - My Kind of Data by Ali Smith. Shared relevant links to learn about data equity and inclusion, disciplinary communities, and creating a kinder world through data.
Wikidata for Teaching Biology: Coloration in Felines (Spanish) - a paper that showcases Wikidata as a learning tool for students through the use of properties and statements applied to biological entities can enhance students computational and informational skills, by Marín1 D. & Michán L.
Advancing Drinking Water Justice at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Conference discusses how Wikidata and Wikibase Cloud can help address differences in data quality (at the 55:00 minute mark)
Au bord de l'eau Mapping Wikidata's items next to a body of water using P206 property.
Tool of the week
MediaWiki:Gadget-dataDrainer.js - this userscript allows you to delete the data of an item. You can choose what you want to delete: labels and/or descriptions and/or aliases and or sitelinks.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
There is a new update relative to the experiment with splitting the Wikidata Query Service graph. A project page for the experiment has also been published.
WMDE is currently conducting a research on Knowledge Equity in Linked Open Data. The goal is to try to better understand how the use of Wikidata, Wikibase Suite, and Wikibase Cloud both support knowledge equity and create barriers to knowledge equity when people are contributing historically and structurally marginalized knowledge and perspectives. If you are interested in participating in this project, please fill out this survey!
Library and Information Science - this new Wikiproject aims to identify and fill gaps in LIS-related content. If you are interested in the areas of librarianship, information studies, metadata and indexing; then please consider joining!
Political murders in the Weimar Republic - Collect historic political murders in the Weimar Republic e.g. through historic newspaper articles or scientific articles.
The graph split testing for the Wikidata Query Service has started. Please find more details in the "Other Noteworthy Stuff" section above.
IP Masking: We are continuing the work on adapting Wikibase for the upcoming IP Masking feature, so that IP addresses for non-logged-in users are no longer published.
Wikibase REST API:
We finished the route for getting and removing a sitelink from an Item (phab:T344039, phab:T344685) and we continue work on the one for adding/ replacing and modifying a sitelink on an Item (phab:T342987, phab:T342988)
We now handle of case sensitive statement IDs in GET, PUT, PATCH and DELETE requests as HTTP redirect (phab:T354261)
We documented the differences in sitelink data structure between Wikibase REST API and Action API responses (phab:T355659)
We fixed the bug where sitelink data did not include badges (phab:T355293)
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split's impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [442][443][444] Users' feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [445][446]
Problems
There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar). [447][448]
As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[449] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [450]
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
If you have the "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed" option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [451]
There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task's description.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [453][454]
Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool's code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [455]
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week. Translations are available.
Discussions
Open request for adminship: WT2O_2 - (RfP deadline: February 22, 2024 17:46 UTC)
Other: Project chat: PI Bot is an interesting conversation about the function of PI Bot in creating Stub articles and evolves into discussing ways of matching articles, categories and templates in sibling projects with their Wikidata items. Contribute to the discussion or even better, use one of the many tools posted and get linking!
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call February 20, 2024: In honor of Valentine's Day month, we are bringing back the popular program from last February: What's Your Wikidata Passion? What is your central Wikidata interest right now? It can be a work or personal project, even if you’re just beginning to think about it, or just what you like to edit when you have time. This is a great way to share your ideas, solicit community input and ask questions about resources or tools. This will be an open mic session, completely informal. Please add yourselves to the list on our agenda here if you would like to talk for 5 minutes or so. You can share your screen if you like, but there’s no need for slides. Or just show up and talk on the spur of the moment. This will be a community session where we welcome all to participate! Agenda
Dancing Digital Project with Rebecca Salzer is a Wikibase instance sharing LOD between itself, video archives and Commons.
WikiPod AI - try listening to last week's Status Updates with AI-generated speaking, an experiment by Tiago Lubiana.
Notebooks: TTTTRPG - Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games queried using SPARQL from Wikidata.
Tool of the week
User:Yair rand/DiffLists.js - this userscript changes the appearance of Recent Changes, Watchlist, Contributions, History pages, and Related Changes. It also adds filter options.
Wikidata Topic Curator (a rewrite of ItemSubjector into a webapp) help wikimedians add relevant topics to items. Based on a given topic QID it fetches articles matching the label, aliases or a custom user-provided term of that QID that is currently missing the main subject property.
Author Disambiguator - is a tool for editing the authors of works recorded in Wikidata, e.g. for finding Wikidata Items for the authors (P50 instead of 'author name string').
Castradenumber (number for a registred subject in a Castrade)
latest end date ((qualifier) latest date on which the statement could have ceased to be true (i.e., latest date beyond which the statement could no longer be true))
anthesis start (time of the year when a plant normally starts flowering)
leaf morphology (characterization of aspects of the shape of a plant’s leaves)
Newest WikiProjects: Looted heritage - aims to use Wikidata to document looted cultural heritage. Its primary focus is on the colonial era, but it also encompasses other relevant historical periods. It's scope includes artworks, sacred items, human remains, and other forms of tangible and intangible artifacts that may be considered a part of a people's heritage.
WikiProject Highlights: Staedel Museum Wikidata Clean-up The Staedul Museum comprises 24,000+ works of art spanning more than 700 years. They have generously opened up digital surrogates of their collection to the Wikimedia community. This project improves the metadata quality and create Wikidata items for works of art.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The mobile visual editor is now the default editor for users who never edited before, at a small group of wikis. Research shows that users using this editor are slightly more successful publishing the edits they started, and slightly less successful publishing non-reverted edits. Users who defined the wikitext editor as their default on desktop will get the wikitext editor on mobile for their first edit on mobile as well. [456]
The mw.config value wgGlobalGroups now only contains groups that are active in the wiki. Scripts no longer have to check whether the group is active on the wiki via an API request. A code example of the above is: if (/globalgroupname/.test(mw.config.get("wgGlobalGroups"))). [457]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 February. It will be on all wikis from 29 February (calendar). [458][459]
Future changes
The right to change edit tags (changetags) will be removed from users in Wikimedia sites, keeping it by default for admins and bots only. Your community can ask to retain the old configuration on your wiki before this change happens. Please indicate in this ticket to keep it for your community before the end of March 2024.
Latest comment: 4 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Special:Book page (as well as the associated "Create a book" functionality) provided by the old Collection extension has been removed from all Wikisource wikis, as it was broken. This does not affect the ability to download normal books, which is provided by the Wikisource extension. [460]
Maintenance on etherpad is completed. If you encounter any issues, please indicate in this ticket.
Gadgets allow interface admins to create custom features with CSS and JavaScript. The Gadget and Gadget_definition namespaces and gadgets-definition-edit user right were reserved for an experiment in 2015, but were never used. These were visible on Special:Search and Special:ListGroupRights. The unused namespaces and user rights are now removed. No pages are moved, and no changes need to be made. [461]
A usability improvement to the "Add a citation" in Wikipedia workflow has been made, the insert button was moved to the popup header. [462]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 March. It will be on all wikis from 7 March (calendar). [463][464]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [465]
The HTML markup of headings and section edit links will be changed later this year to improve accessibility. See Heading HTML changes for details. The new markup will be the same as in the new Parsoid wikitext parser. You can test your gadget or stylesheet with the new markup if you add ?useparsoid=1 to your URL (more info) or turn on Parsoid read views in your user options (more info).
Latest comment: 3 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 March. It will be on all wikis from 14 March (calendar). [466][467]
After consulting with various communities, the line height of the text on the Minerva skin will be increased to its previous value of 1.65. Different options for typography can also be set using the options in the menu, as needed. [468]
The active link color in Minerva will be changed to provide more consistency with our other platforms and best practices. [469]
Structured data on Commons will no longer ask whether you want to leave the page without saving. This will prevent the “information you’ve entered may not be saved” popups from appearing when no information have been entered. It will also make file pages on Commons load faster in certain cases. However, the popups will be hidden even if information has indeed been entered. If you accidentally close the page before saving the structured data you entered, that data will be lost. [470]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 20. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [471][472]
The parameters for how you obtain tokens in the MediaWiki API were changed in 2014. The old way will no longer work from 1 September. Scripts, bots and tools that use the parameters from before the 2014 change need to be updated. You can read more about this.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 September. It will be on all wikis from 2 September (calendar).
aib.it to book and receive the link of the event.
). [117]
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
The deprecated 
![[304]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_editor_toolbar_search_feature.png){kind=link}
