Wikibase Community User Group/Reports/2020

2020 was the third year of existence of the Wikibase Community User Group. 🀝 Meetings and notable πŸ’¬ Telegram and πŸ“§ mailing list discussions are noted below. You can also see the 2018, 2019 and 2021 reports.

While there were good discussions and help was provided in a majority of cases, a few queries fell through the cracks, both on Telegram and the mailing list. Some cases may have been because the right people did not see them, or have time to respond; others may reveal gaps in feature or documentation. Regular meetings were not maintained during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, although some resumed afterwards.

Activities

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Below is summarised the relevant activities and discussions of members within the user group's official channels, and at organized meetings and events. Telegram discussions may be read via date search after joining the channel.

January

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  • (Jan 3) πŸ’¬ Identifying the WDQS SPARQL endpoint (for use in Python's SPARQLWrapper)
  • (Jan 9) πŸ’¬ Use of WikidataIntegrator fast-run with Wikibase
  • (Jan 15-16) πŸ’¬ The need to increase $wgAccountRequestThrottle in the ConfirmAccount extension if requesting multiple accounts for workshops.
  • (Jan 18) πŸ’¬ The Wikibase quality constraints gadget's interaction with eval-unsafe Content Security Policy, and how to import/configure constraints
  • (Jan 20-21) πŸ’¬ Questions about a) why http: is used as the Concept URI for WDQS, and how to redirect to the appropriate HTTPS page, b) why wd/wdt are used as prefixes, and whether this will cause problems for federated queries (answer: probably), and c) differing use of prefixes on PersonalData.IO and Wikilex35, the former allowing non-prefixed queries by specifying a default in query service config
  • (Jan 22) πŸ’¬ Visit of Swiss French newspaper Le Temps to PersonalData.IO Wikibase instance for collaborative investigations
  • (Jan 25) πŸ’¬ How to do RDF dumps and imports
  • (Jan 26) πŸ’¬ Use of $wgWBRepoSettings['propertyOrderUrl'] to order properties on the page (Wikidata), and the difference with StatementGrouper (e.g. zones for statements vs. identifiers vs. constraints)
  • (Jan 26) πŸ’¬ Using the Wikibase Registry for documentation, and recording of extension/gadget usage
  • (Jan 27) πŸ’¬ Letting users save URL values when blocked by the ConfirmEdit extension, by setting $wgGroupPermissions['autoconfirmed']['skipcatcha'] = true (works by itself as autoconfirm defaults are 0)

February

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March

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  • (Mar 4-5) πŸ’¬ Best practices for mapping local properties to Wikidata using SKOS mapping properties and WikidataIntegrator
  • (Mar 9-10) πŸ’¬ Getting Quickstatements authentication to work with wikibase-docker - issues with entrypoint.sh
  • (Mar 10-15) πŸ’¬ Enriching a local wikibase with Wikidata content: federated queries via mapping identifier (avoids duplicating effort and going out of data, requires nuance over mapping) vs. importing data and using OpenRefine (simpler to query, better for full-text search)
  • (Mar 12) πŸ’¬ Using the API Sandbox to list properties using action=query&list=allpages&gapnamespace=XXX (and optionally labels with prop=pageterms&generator=allpages&wbpatterns=label; namespaces can be found with action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=namespaces)
  • (Mar 13) πŸ’¬ Changing the datatype of a property after creation can be done iff they have the same value type; use maintenance script extensions/Wikibase/repo/maintenance/changePropertyDataType.php (this topic repeated May 5)
  • (Mar 17-18) πŸ’¬ Discussion of mapping open-source COVID-19 projects and capturing of the Special Announcement schema
  • (Mar 21) SPARQL query optimization
  • (Mar 22-23) πŸ“§ Accessing Wikidata over an API - suggested use of SPARQL endpoint via Semantic MediaWiki LinkedWiki extension rather than Wikibase Client
  • (Mar 26-28) πŸ’¬ Identifying resynchronization issue after failed upgrade to wikibase-docker bundle 1.34, and using WikibaseQualityConstraints with 1.33

April

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  • (May 7, May 22) πŸ’¬ Sorting properties, and raising the size limit of monolingual text to store abstracts
  • (May 8) πŸ’¬ LocalSettings.php required to be created/mounted in wikibase-docker container to prevent wikibase-docker from performing startup tasks, especially CirrusSearch|Elastic/CirrusSearch indexing
  • (May 11) πŸ’¬ Duplicating items and using qualifiers to annotate statements
  • (May 15) πŸ’¬ Suggestion to hardcode conceptBaseUri if changing the wikibase-docker language with MW_SITE_LANG (but it only changed @prefix wd:, not @prefix data:)
  • (May 16-17) πŸ’¬ Changing the title of random pages, and making them Item; as it defaults to only content namespaces, add it to them (suggested as a default) or make MediaWiki:Randompage-url link to Special:Random/Item
  • (May 18) πŸ’¬ Dealing with WDQS updater reporting that the last update time is before the minimum safe poll time (by deleting the data.jnl file and restarting WDQS and the updater)
  • (May 18-19) πŸ’¬ Adding the Wikidata merge gadget (not entirely successfully)
  • (May 19) πŸ’¬ Adapting Cradle to WBStack
  • (May 19) πŸ’¬ Unanswered question about how to use UPDATER_OPTS with wikibase-docker
  • (May 20) πŸ’¬ Quickstatements consumerKey and consumerSecret empty in oauth.ini; resolved by creating a new consumer with extensions/OAuth/maintenance/OAuthConsumer.php
  • (May 22) πŸ’¬ Getting the revision history of a wikibase item through the API
  • (May 23) πŸ’¬ Updating qualifiers of a statement using the API; tools may require the full value of the snak, not just the string to change
  • (May 30-31) πŸ’¬ De-duplicating references via script

June

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July

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August

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  • (Aug 5-8) πŸ’¬ Discussion of means to get Wikidata-enabled infoboxes on non-WMF wikis; possibility of using LinkedWiki
  • (Aug 6) 🀝 Wikibase Live Session: Focus on data modeling presented by Lozana Rossenova. (notes)
  • (Aug 7) πŸ’¬ WikidataIntegrator, sparql-client and internal Requests module as alternatives to qwikidata library for non-Wikidata wikibases
  • (Aug 9) πŸ’¬ Potential for for-profit hybrid scraper/miner + user contribution service to restrict access to data download and limiting querying
  • (Aug 10-11) πŸ’¬ Jobs queueing up due to failure of WDQS updater, over minimum safe poll time (stop WDQS service and updater, delete WDQS data.jnl (or volume), turn back on if no data loaded; else reload from dump)
  • (Aug 15) πŸ’¬ Need for WikibaseCirrusSearch extension in addition to CirrusSearch for haswbstatement: P1 searches to work
  • (Aug 16, 23, 29-30) πŸ’¬ Using the OpenRefine reconciliation service, initially to convert a Google Sheet to QuickStatements
  • (Aug 17-18) πŸ’¬ Inserting RDF triples from data modelled in ProtΓ©gΓ© and Karma to Wikibase via the wikibase-api and custom Python scripts
  • (Aug 24-25) πŸ’¬ Migration from Windows to Ubuntu Linux triggered error referencing Class 'Wikibase\\DataModel\\Entity\\ItemId' not found (task T197868#4324109) - Composer update required
  • (Aug 26) πŸ’¬ Fix for QuickStatements authentication failure due to MagnusTools update

September

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October

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November

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  • (Nov 12) 🀝 Wikibase Live Session: Participants share-out anything new or exciting that’s been happening with their Wikibase instance; what they've been doing recently, what is working well, what has been challenging for them, etc. (notes)
  • (Nov 20) πŸ“§ Looking for tutorials on Entity Schema creation (unanswered on list)

December

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  • (Dec 17) 🀝 Wikibase Live Session: Federation discussion, SPARQL, Wikibase vs. Semantic MediaWiki and tabular data, poll on Wikibase discussion platforms (notes)