PNAS – Official journal of the National Academy of Sciences
EBSCO – New Arabic and Spanish language databases added
We have a wide array of other collections available, and a significant number now no longer require individual applications to access! Read more in our blog post.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects!
Continuing development on the first version of the Query Builder. It's starting to be able to do the first really meaningful queries now. Latest addition was the ability to negate conditions. Up next is the ability to connect conditions with OR instead of only AND as well as querying for quantities and ranges. You can follow along on the test system.
Exploring possible solutions for how to compare Wikidata's data against other databases to find and highlight mismatches automatically.
Added lexicographical data codes for a few languages: rkt, ctg (phab:T271589), and az-cyrl (phab:T265906)
Finished working on the issue of TypeError on a diff of a Wikidata talk page phab:T271402
Updated Wikidata unit conversion configuration (phab:T267644)
Fixed two last places where links in the the Query Service UI were not using Special:MyLanguage yet to redirect to the documentation page in the user's language (phab:T267656)
Pushing JSON dumps for Lexemes over the finish line (phab:T264883)
Working on showing an error when trying to save lemmas with invalid language codes (phab:T265783)
Wikibase Release Strategy
Investigated the release of Wikibase suite components not maintained by Wikimedia (phab:T271193)
Continued process of adding additional components to the Wikibase release, including OAuth (phab:T272580)
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
IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed. [1]
Changes later this week
You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource. [2]
Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background. [3][4]
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 1.2.3.4 - 1.2.3.55 as well as the 1.2.3.4/27 syntax for IP ranges. [5]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Future changes
Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more. [6][7]
Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be 185.15.56.1. This will happen on February 8. You can read 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
The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app. [8]
Changes later this week
You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis. [9]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Future changes
When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones. [10][11]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [12]
Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead. [13]
Video: Wikidata as a PID community. By Simon Cobb - YouTube
Tool of the week
Item documentation has two new features. First, it now includes two predefined SPARQL queries. The first one give the number of statements about the item by property and the second the list of statement about the properties. Second, for items of class award, it includes predefined SPARQL queries from TP award. See Q1624297 for an example.
Ranker lets you edit the ranks of several statements at once.
Made it possible to connect query conditions with OR (instead of only AND) in the Query Builder (phab:T272694)
Making it possible to query only for statements with or without a reference in the Query Builder (phab:T272699)
Continuing to work on adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to prevent people from allocating a large number of unassigned Item IDs that are then lost (phab:T272032)
Working on the problem of Lexeme merging failing if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Working on showing an error when trying to save a Lemma with invalid language code on a Lexeme (phab:T265783)
Fixing an issue in the Property selector fallback where it is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Making it possible to add Interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
Video: Wikidata editing #31 Free Software Day - YouTube, Facebook
Video: Knowledge Graphs for AI: Wikidata and beyond - YouTube
Tool of the week
UseAsRef script allows you to add references to statements using one external ID as source (see User:Bargioni/UseAsRef and this YouTube video for more information)
Public Domain Tool, developed by the Flemish Institute for Archives automates the process of determining whether their collection items could be in the public domain.
Sizes of country items (like "Portugal" (Q45)) were recently reduced by 30% to 50% by moving a few economics properties to "economy of"-items (sample: "economy of Portugal" (Q1649355)). The item "economy of Portugal" is currently larger than "Portugal". This can simplify uses of country items that previously timed-out. Infoboxes can still access the properties with the link through "economy of topic" (P8744).
Later this week, the development team will enable a rate limit for assigning new item IDs. Bots and users who successfully create items should notice no change, since the rate limit is equal to the existing limit on all edits. However, bots that often fail to create items may start to see different error messages than usual. This will hopefully reduce the problem of skipped item IDs.
Work on the Simple Query Builder continues. We finished connecting query conditions via OR (phab:T272694). Next we will work on adding the UI for sharing the visual query via a link (phab:T272887)
Improved the deployment process for the Query Service UI to make it easier to deploy
Fixed language code "dag" for Dagbani not working for Lemmas for Lexemes (phab:T272242)
Fixing the bug where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language for Property labels (phab:T272712)
Adding a rate limit for creating Item IDs to avoid skipping so many due to misbehaving bots (phab:T272032)
Fixed the case where no error was shown when trying to save a lemma with an invalid language code (phab:T265783)
Fixed a but where merging two Lexemes fails if the source Lexeme has links to its own Senses (phab:T273830)
Increasing the rate of edits that trigger a check by the constraint checker to 50%. This will increase the number of constraints violations that you can query in the Query Service. (phab:T204031)
Making it possible to add interwiki links to/from Multilingual Wikisource (phab:T138332)
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 were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned. [15][16]
Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance. [17]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
A maintenance operation will be performed tomorrow morning UTC time (Wednesday 17th at 07:00 AM UTC).
It will impact all wikis and is supposed to last up to one minute.
During this time, new translations may fail, and Notifications may not be delivered. For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Past: Online Talk Show on Fri, Feb 19, 2021, by Wikimedia Indonesia and Fariz Darari - Take a peek into the data warehouse of Wikimedia projects (= Wikidata): Youtube link
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Adding bibliographic data to Wikidata with Jason Evans, Wikimedian in residence at the Wales National Library, Tuesday, February 23rd.[18]
Upcoming video: LIVE Wikidata editing #33 - YouTube, Facebook, February 27
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 visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images. [19]
Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly. [21]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 February. It will be on all wikis from 25 February (calendar).
Future changes
There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.
Upcoming: Wikidata-based Data Sprint hosted by the University of New Brunswick. One Wikidata data set will be provided on 11th March 2021 and various teams will have 2 hours to run a set of SPARQL queries against the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and showcase their results.
Video: How to create new Wikidata item (in Dutch) - YouTube
Video: Merging Wikidata items (in Dutch) - YouTube
Tool of the week
EditSum, a new user script which allows to attach custom summary text to any label/statement/sitelink/etc. modification.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
User:Nikki/LexemeInterwikiLinks.js, is a userscript that adds Wiktionary interwiki links in the sidebar on Lexeme pages. (It links to pages corresponding to the first lemma and puts the lexeme language's Wiktionary first, followed by languages in the user's Babel box).
Shared Citations, a proposal arising from the WikiCite project, for a central reference management database supporting all Wikimedia projects, with significant relationship to Wikidata. Seeking feedback.
Modèle:Indice de diversité de genre (Template:Gender diversity index) is a new template in the French Wikipedia which use P21 (gender property) to count the number of people by gender mentioned in an article. It helps to find articles which "forget" to cite women.
Lexeme JSON dumps are now available as a collection of individual lexeme data in the regular JSON format, separate from the regular Wikidata dumps containing Items and Properties. phab:T264883
Working on first version of small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items and find the lowest-quality Items in the batch so it's easier to improve them.
Taking a closer look at what larger improvements we want to make to Lexemes later this year.
Thinking through different ways how we can technically get mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases so we can later expose them.
Thinking through what the first version of the REST API should contain and what should come later.
Fixed an issue with whitespaces when editing Lexemes (phab:T250550)
Made sure all languages show up in the language selector for monolingual text Properties at least with their language code because them not showing up was very confusing (phab:T124758)
Fixed an issue with generating correct links for external IDs with + (phab:T271126)
Fixing an issue with Property selector not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Due to the planned delay of the release of MediaWiki 1.36, the Wikibase team has been working on preparing a Wikibase update that includes new functionality (such as the “Federated Properties” feature) based on v1.35. To that end, we started backporting certain features and fixes into the Wikibase 1.35 release. Follow our progress here.
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
Wikis using the Growth team tools can now show the name of a newcomer's mentor anywhere through a magic word. This can be used for welcome messages or userboxes.
A new version of the VideoCutTool is now available. It enables cropping, trimming, audio disabling, and rotating video content. It is being created as part of the developer outreach programs.
Problems
There was a problem with the job queue. This meant some functions did not save changes and mass messages were delayed. This did not affect wiki edits. [22]
Some editors may not be logged in to their accounts automatically in the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. [23]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 March. It will be on all wikis from 4 March (calendar).
Upcoming: OSM TW x Wikidata Taiwan 模板:Q Meetup 2021-03-08 模板:Q
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: OCLC Research’s CONTENTdm Wikibase data model for pilot project to improve collection discoverability, Tuesday, March 9th.[24]
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, March 9 at 18:00 CET
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #35 - YouTube, Facebook, March 13
"Giving knowledge back to Wikipedia: Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources" (by DBPedia)
Fixed an issue where the Property selector is not falling back from language variant to major language (phab:T272712)
Working on support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity (phab:T199896)
Continuing to work on the Query Builder and making it possible to query for quantities and dates with it.
Putting finishing touches on a small tool that lets you get the average ORES quality score for a list of Items as well as the individual scores for each of the Items
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
Section translation now works on Bengali Wikipedia. It helps mobile editors translate sections of articles. It will come to more wikis later. The first focus is active wikis with a smaller number of articles. You can test it and leave feedback.
When someone links to a Wikipedia article on Twitter this will now show a preview of the article. [26]
Problems
Many graphs have JavaScript errors. Graph editors can check their graphs in their browser's developer console after editing. [27]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 March. It will be on all wikis from 11 March (calendar).
The New Discussion tool will soon be a new discussion tools beta feature for on most Wikipedias. The goal is to make it easier to start new discussions. [28]
Future changes
There will be a number of changes to make it easier to work with templates. Some will come to the first wikis in March. Other changes will come to the first wikis in June. This is both for those who use templates and those who create or maintain them. You can read more.
Reference Previews will become a default feature on some wikis on 17 March. They will share a setting with Page Previews. If you prefer the Reference Tooltips or Navigation-Popups gadget you can keep using them. If so Reference Previews won't be shown. [29][30]
New JavaScript-based functions will not work in Internet Explorer 11. This is because Internet Explorer is an old browser that doesn't work with how JavaScript is written today. Everything that works in Internet Explorer 11 today will continue working in Internet Explorer for now. You can read more.
Plant Humanities Lab is a website you can use to explore the cultural histories of plants and their influence on human societies.
DX Lab Art Index is an interactive database of over 18,000 nineteenth century Australian Artworks by over 2000 artists with links to Wikidata & compiled by volunteers over 10 years.
The new WDQS Streaming Updater is live as of March 15, 2021 on a pre-production test server for feedback. Available at https://query-preview.wikidata.org/. Release details here.
Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year - Call for Nominations! The research must be on, about, using data from, and/or of importance to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects. Deadline to submit your nomination is no later than 2021-03-22.
Continued working on the Query Builder and focused on querying for quantity values (phab:T268942), handling special cases around sub classes for taxons and locations (phab:T274634) adding tooltips (phab:T275542) and sharing a visual query (phab:T272887)
Making changes to how Cognate handles redirects on Wiktionary to make more pages accessible through interwiki links (phab:T165061)
Creating a dashboard to break down the number of editors by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finishing support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via wbeditentity API module (phab:T199896)
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
Wikis that are part of the desktop improvements project can now use a new search function. The desktop improvements and the new search will come to more wikis later. You can also test it early.
Editors who put up banners or change site-wide JavaScript code should use the client error graph to see that their changes has not caused problems. You can read more. [31]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 March. It will be on all wikis from 18 March (calendar).
Future changes
You can add a newline or carriage return character to a custom signature if you use a template. There is a proposal to not allow them in the future. This is because they can cause formatting problems. [32][33]
You will be able to read but not edit 12 wikis for a short period of time on 23 March at 06:00 (UTC). This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
You can use Quarry for SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 23 March. There will be a new field to specify the database to connect to. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech. PAWS and other ways to do SQL queries to the Wiki Replicas will be affected later. [34]
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 Wikipedia app for KaiOS phones. They don't have a touch screen so readers navigate with the phone keys. There is now a simulator so you can see what it looks like.
You will be able to read but not edit twelve wikis for a short period of time on 23 三月 at 06:00 (UTC). This can also affect password changes, logging in to new wikis, global renames and changing or confirming emails. This could take 30 minutes but will probably be much faster.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 March. It will be on all wikis from 25 March (calendar).
Flagged revisions will no longer have multiple tags like "tone" or "depth". It will also only have one tier. This was changed because very few wikis used these features and they make the tool difficult to maintain. [36][37]
Gadgets and user scripts can access variables about the current page in JavaScript. In 2015 this was moved from wg* to mw.config. wg* will soon no longer work. [38]
March 22: Bug triage hour about Lexemes with Lydia Pintscher
March 23: SPARQL querying for Lexemes with Vigneron
March 24: Open discussion in French about Lexemes
March 25: Documentation Q&A with Dan Shick
March 27: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata, with Poslovitch
Upcoming: The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 25 March 2021(Add to calendar). This month we will have a team member from Enslaved.org talk to us briefly about how they are using Linked Open Data (LOD) with the help of Wikibase (due of technical challenges they couldn't join us last time). Everyone is welcome to attend the call.
Upcoming: The Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is taking place remotely on June 24-25, and focusing on indigenous and underrepresented languages on the Wikimedia projects. The call for submissions is now open until April 15th, if you want to present something related to Wikidata and languages, feel free to apply.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Members of the EthicsLD Group will be leading a discussion on ethics in linked data, Tuesday, March 23rd.[39]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #37 - YouTube, Facebook, March 27
erinnerungshort.de/kap/ is a data and photo research project and map visualization tool with federated license query from Structured Commons, by Raymond and Elya.
~7500 person items have been enriched with the new property GEPRIS person ID (P4872), imported from a high quality dataset from the Q707283.
Work on the first version of the Query Builder is nearing its end. Doing remaining work on querying for quantities, dates and ranges as well as polishing and bug fixing.
Made Cognate work correctly for redirects on Wiktionary (phab:T165061)
Fixed an issue where the termbox on Item pages used the wrong list of languages on the mobile version (phab:T275611)
Cleaned up deleted Items from the term store database table (phab:T263730)
Got feedback on the initial click-dummies for checking Wikidata's data against other databases to find mismatches
The dev team spent the last week prototyping a few things to learn if some things would be feasible/a good idea. Among other things we tried building a small tool to connect Senses to Items, looked into the different types of ontology issues that can be found on Wikidata and checked what using a document store for data storage would look like.
Note: from March 29th until April 12th, Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) is not available to answer messages. If you have any requests for the development team, please ask on Contact the development team. For any emergency, you can contact Lea Lacroix (WMDE). Because of Easter holidays in Germany, the upcoming newsletter will be issued one day later, on April 6th.
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 very old web browsersdon’t work well with the Wikimedia wikis. Some old code for browsers that used to be supported is being removed. This could cause issues in those browsers. [40]
IRC recent changes feeds have been moved to a new server. Make sure all tools automatically reconnect to irc.wikimedia.org and not to the name of any specific server. Users should also consider switching to the more modern EventStreams. [41]
Problems
When you move a page that many editors have on their watchlist the history can be split. It might also not be possible to move it again for a while. This is because of a job queue problem. [42]
Some translatable pages on Meta could not be edited. This was because of a bug in the translation tool. The new MediaWiki version was delayed because of problems like this. [43][44]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 March. It will be on all wikis from 1 April (calendar).
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
Editors can collapse part of an article so you have to click on it to see it. When you click a link to a section inside collapsed content it will now expand to show the section. The browser will scroll down to the section. Previously such links didn't work unless you manually expanded the content first. [45]
Changes later this week
The citoidAPI will use for example 2010-12-XX instead of 2010-12 for dates with a month but no days. This is because 2010-12 could be confused with 2010-2012 instead of December 2010. This is called level 1 instead of level 0 in the Extended Date/Time Format. [46]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 April. It will be on all wikis from 8 April (calendar).
Future changes
PAWS can now connect to the new Wiki Replicas. Cross-database JOINS will no longer work from 28 April. There is a new way to connect to the databases. Until 28 April both ways to connect to the databases will work. If you think this affects you and you need help you can post on Phabricator or on Wikitech.
April 7: Data import for Lexemes: how to add a lot of content in your language
April 8: Documentation Q&A
April 8: Leveraging text corpora for curating lexicographical data
April 10: Lingua Libre, how you can record words in your language and use them on Wikidata
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Cliff Landis (Digital Initiatives Librarian, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library) on “GaNCH: Using Wikidata for Georgia's Natural, Cultural, and Historic Organizations' Disaster Response.” April 6th.[47]
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #39 - YouTube, Facebook, April 10
Wikidata Lexeme Forms now supports additional Breton templates (Source)
User:Nikki/LexemeAddIPA.js userscript adds a link in the header for forms on lexeme pages which opens a dialog for adding IPA statements to forms that do not have any yet.
LexSAOB adds Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB) identifiers to Swedish lexemes in Wikidata.
We continued to make improvements to the Query builder. We worked on adding a footer to the Query Builder (phab:T268643) and showing all relevant columns in the query result (phab:T277646) as well as querying for dates (phab:T272697)
Fixed a bug where Item pages scrolls back to "In more languages" block after every change of DOM (phab:T277999, being deployed to Wikidata later this week)
Continued working on a new grafana graph to track editor numbers split by namespace (phab:T275999)
Finished a small tool to get the ORES quality score for a list of Items. Waiting for deployment to toolforge for broader use now.
Defined remaining work for redirect sitelink exceptions (phab:T278962)
Royal Trees, powered by Wikidata is an interactive website that shows royal family trees, for all royal families worldwide. See an example of Philip Duke of Edinburgh.
Started research and collecting material for the work on improvements to the Lexeme UI and prepared the first interviews
Finishing up the work on the first version of the Query Builder. We still need to get the security review before we can deploy it properly. Current state can be tested on the test system.
Finalized the dashboard to see the number of (active/very active) editors split by namespace. See the graphs at the bottom of this dashboard.
Continued working on the remaining pieces needed to fully support editing statements on Senses of a Lexeme (phab:T199896)
Upcoming: SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, April 20 at 18:00 CEST
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Alexandra Wong on experiences and workflows for linking archival collections to Wikidata. There will also be a recap of insights from the recent Canadian archivists’ panel on Wikidata by the University and College Archives Special Interest Section (UCASIS) of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA). Agenda, April 20
Upcoming: Wikipedia Weekley Network - Biodiversity edition: iNaturalist place ID YouTube, Facebook, April 23
Upcoming: LIVE Wikidata editing #41 - YouTube, Facebook, April 24
Upcoming: 25 April - WikidataDays Sessions II, an online editing session dedicated to democracy and political parties, coinciding with the celebration of Freedom Day.
Structured Data on Commons explained, with Andrew Lih, John Cummings and Pharos (Youtube)
Discovering history's notable people (audio). Using Wikidata and Wikipedia as the backbone, this project "construct[s] a new dataset of more than seven million notable individuals across recorded human history".
User:So9q/Gadget-CreateNewEntity.js is a userscript to add a "create new item" link in the dropdown menu for when you want to * add an item to a property, but the item does not exist. (recently modified to support lexemes).
Wikidata Lexeme Forms no longer automatically redirects you to login, so you can now use edit mode to view the forms of a lexeme in the “right” order. Here is an example.
Finished work on the support for editing statements on Senses on Lexemes via the API (phab:T199896)
Got all feature work done on the first version of the Query Builder. It is now awaiting security review.
Statements linking to deleted Lexemes now indicate this similar to statements linking to deleted Items (phab:T277089)
Fixing a bug with misaligned grammatical features after an OOUI update (phab:T278522)
Finished work on the small tools to get the number of constraints violations and ORES scores for a list of Items. Will publish soon.
Did interviews with a few people about how they work around lexicographical data
Selected focus languages for continued work on lexicographical data and Abstract Wikipedia together with Abstract Wikipedia team. The selected ones are Hausa, Igbo, Bengali, Malayalam and Dagbani. You can read more about it in the Abstract Wikipedia newsletter.
Gave input to WMF search platform team for a survey draft around the query service in order to better understand how to move forward with improvements
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
Email to the Wikimedia wikis are handled by groups of Wikimedia editors. These volunteer response teams now use Znuny instead of OTRS. The functions and interface remain the same. The volunteer administrators will give more details about the next steps soon. [48][49]
If you use syntax highlighting, you can see line numbers in the 2010 and 2017 wikitext editors when editing templates. This is to make it easier to see line breaks or talk about specific lines. Line numbers will soon come to all namespaces. [50][51][52]
Because of a technical change there could be problems with gadgets and scripts that have an edit summary area that looks similar to this one. If they look strange they should use mw.loader.using('mediawiki.action.edit.styles') to go back to how they looked before. [53]
The latest version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis last week. There was no Tech News issue last week.
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
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 two weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections.
Working with Zotero on WiKidata (in Italian) - YouTube
Tool of the week
User:So9q/AddNewLexemeMenu.js is a userscript that adds a section to the sidebar with links for creating new lexemes.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
WMDE built two tools to help editors get a better understanding of the quality of Wikidata's data in a specific area of interest. Try them out and let us know what you think.
Collaborative translation of Cita is now available on translatewiki.net. Cita is a Wikidata addon that adds citations metadata support to Zotero, using cites work (P2860) information from Wikidata, and enabling users to easily contribute missing data. Cita is currently under development with a WikiCite grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, and presentation workshops will be held on May 27th (Spanish) and May 31st (English). More info and pre-registration here.
RaiseWikibase is a tool for speeding up multilingual knowledge graph construction with Wikibase. Among other features, it can be utilized to create a mini Wikibase instance with Wikidata properties in a few minutes.
wbeditentity now supports editing statements on Senses (phab:T199896)
We added syntax highlighting for viewing Entity Schema pages. There is not syntax highlighting for editing of Entity Schemas yet. (phab:T238831)
Improved the way Lua deals with redirects (phab:T238831)
Worked on making it possible to add a title to the top of a query visualization via a comment in the SPARQL code (phab:T225883)
Discussed how to get persistent storage of constraint violations unstuck as this is a prerequisite to making it easier to analyze and query constraint violations (phab:T214362)
Discussed a high-level plan for how to move forward with checking Wikidata's data against 3rd-party databases
Finished work on version 1 of the Query Builder. Not it is awaiting security review before we can deploy it.
Take a list of cities in your country, add 模板:Template in the talk page and have fun looking at people born in this place ordered by number of sitelinks. You may have some surprises!
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
Templates have parameters that can have specific values. It is possible to suggest values for editors with TemplateData. You can soon see them as a drop-down list in the visual editor. This is to help template users find the right values faster. [54][55][56]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 April. It will be on all wikis from 29 April (calendar).
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
Twinkle is a gadget on English Wikipedia. It can help with maintenance and patrolling. It can now be used on other wikis. You can get Twinkle on your wiki using the twinkle-starter GitHub repository.
Some things will not work for about a minute on 5 May. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This will affect the content translation tool and notifications among other things. This is because of an upgrade to avoid crashes. [58]
Changes later this week
Reference Previews will become a default feature on a number of wikis on 5 May. This is later than planned because of some changes. You can use it without using Page Previews if you want to. The earlier plan was to have the preference to use both or none. [59][60]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 May. It will be on all wikis from 6 May (calendar).
Future changes
The CSS classes .error, .warning and .success do not work for mobile readers if they have not been specifically defined on your wiki. From June they will not work for desktop readers. This can affect gadgets and templates. The classes can be defined in MediaWiki:Common.css or template styles instead. [61]
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
Wikinegata is a platform for browsing interesting negations about Wikidata entities. (Overview video)
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Template:Item classification and Template:Item documentation now include more generic queries for classes: it include the number of subclasses, the number of instances, the number of instances by class, the list of instances and the list of most frequent properties for items of this class.
TP organization now includes generic queries for items of class school.
Entity Schemas now have syntax highlighting for viewing (phab:T238831, example)
Reviewing a patch that will make it possible to use templates on d:MediaWiki:Wikibase-SortedProperties. This will for example make it possible to show labels automatically for each Property ID. Thanks, Luca! (phab:T280787)
Evaluated the interviews and other research we did around improvements for lexicographical data
Continuing to work on evaluating and addressing scaling issues of the Query Service
Provided input to a research team working on a potential new and improved Property Suggester
Wikibase: we are completing the final tasks necessary to prepare the Wikibase Spring release and expect to publish new versions of the tarball and Docker images on or before May 15, 2021
User:Nikki/Ranker.js adds a link to the Ranker tool next to every property on an entity page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
The Wikibase spring release is now available! This new release is compatible with MediaWiki 1.35 and it contains new features: Federated Properties, WikibaseManifest & Wikibase Pingback.
May 2021 Query Builder updates: We finished usability testing of new features and incorporated feedback from users including people with visual impairments and RTL languages. It is now possible to query for dates and we're also looking into making the Query Builder discoverable from the Wikidata Query Service.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Omaha-Ponca language is now available for monolingual text properties. (phab:T265296)
Added a meaningful error message when trying to use Special:EntityData with a Lexeme subentity like L123-F1 in cases where the Lexeme L123 was redirected to another Lexeme (phab:T257494)
Changed the “type” and “value type” constraints to ignore deprecated values (phab:T170401)
Working on rendering empty claims in JSON as `claims: {}` instead of `claims: []` (phab:T241422)
Investigating some issues with page_props missing on Commons wiki after adding sitelinks to Commons categories (phab:T280627)
Removed Google Knowledge Graph Id (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) from the Property Suggestions as they are usually not useful suggestions (phab:T280779)
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 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 May. It will be on all wikis from 13 May (calendar).
Future changes
You can see what participants plan to work on at the online Wikimedia hackathon 22–23 May.
France report: Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2021; French open content report
Germany report: Northern Exposure for cultural heritage data
India report: Proofread competition on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with British Library
Indonesia report: Wikisource Competition 2021; Museum Daerah Deli Serdang is now on Commons
Italy report: A Wikipedian in residence at the Civic Museum of Modena: report
Netherlands report: WikiVrijdagen with Atria and IHLIA, Wikimedians in Residence will increase the visibility of media art on Wikipedia, Wikimedia training: shared heritage, Papiamentu and Papiamento: Wikipedia is up and ready to go!
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 earlier issue of Tech News said that the citoidAPI would handle dates with a month but no days in a new way. This has been reverted for now. There needs to be more discussion of how it affects different wikis first. [67]
Changes later this week
MediaWiki:Pageimages-blacklist will be renamed MediaWiki:Pageimages-denylist. The list can be copied to the new name. It will happen on 19 May for some wikis and 20 May for some wikis. Most wikis don't use it. It lists images that should never be used as thumbnails for articles. [68]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 May. It will be on all wikis from 20 May (calendar).
Data literacy snacks - Talk about "Wikibase knowledge graphs for data management & data science" on 23rd of June. For registration, send e-mail to info@berd-bw.de
Upcoming
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, May 18 at 18:00 CEST
May 21-22, 2021 [69] Boston Rock City: Explore Wikidata and Learn About Local Music: Boston Public Library is partnering with Harvard Library for a guided exploration of Wikidata and local music history. Join us for two days of music and Wikidata editing; no prior experience or punk cred necessary! This public event is free to all and will take place via Zoom; please register in advance. The subject of this project is the Arthur Freedman Collection, and audiovisual archive that captures over four decades of Boston rock music performances. We’ll provide: instructions, tools, data sources, visualizations, optional Discord chat, and a soundtrack. If you have questions, please contact Harvard Library staff member Peter Laurence at laurenc@fas.harvard.edu.
Template:Annotate QID (currently on en. & de.Wikisource) allows names and other terms in texts to be semantically annotated with the equivalent QIDs. sv.Wikisource has a similar template.
Wikimedia Foundation 2021 Board Elections has been announced. Please sign-up as an Election Volunteer if you'd like to support the elections. Election Volunteers serve as a bridge between the Elections Committee, the facilitation team and the movement.
Fixed the entity usage dashboards that no longer showed data due to technical issues. It tracks how much data from Wikidata is used on the other Wikimedia projects. (phab:T279762)
Configured the Property Suggester to not suggest Google Knowledge Graph ID (P2671) and Wolfram Language entity code (P4839) (phab:T280779)
Investigated remaining issue with updating the page_props table on the client wikis, which is confusing some bots making use of that table (phab:T280627)
Fixed an issue in the Query Builder where it got confused when adding several conditions with the same Property (phab:T279945)
Working on tracking the number of edits per namespace over time (phab:T281356)
Working on fixing a bug where old revisions of Items have edit buttons but should not (phab:T281587)
Fixing an issue where value suggestions are not showing all values that are defined in the property constraint (phab:T280650)
#1Lib1Ref Campaign in Italy, as part of the IFLA Wikidata Working Group campaign (May 15 - June 5); more than 10k references have already been added (see the dashboard for more details)
Wikidata-related projects that have been developed/improved during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2021:
User:Lucas_Werkmeister/Ranker - Finished and announced the batch modes for the Ranker tool, allowing users to edit the ranks of statements in Wikidata or Structured Data on Commons in bulk
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 Wikimedia movement has been using IRC on a network called Freenode. There have been changes around who is in control of the network. The Wikimedia IRC Group Contacts have decided to move to the new Libera Chat network instead. This is not a formal decision for the movement to move all channels but most Wikimedia IRC channels will probably leave Freenode. There is a migration guide and ongoing Wikimedia discussions about this.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 May. It will be on all wikis from 27 May (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 1 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Affinity Group Co-facilitators will recap the last year, introduce plans for the coming year, and receive suggestions from the community for future sessions.; [70], June 1st.
Italian Wikiversity used Lua on their Recent Changes SpecialPage via overwriting a MediaWiki message. Our code used to not expect that, now it does. (phab:T283240)
Updating the panel that tracks Wikidata edits over time in different namespaces to include all namespaces (phab:T281356)
Working on adding a new constraints type for Lexemes (phab:T200689)
Working on designs for improving Special:NewLexeme
Working on designs for the system to find mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases
Fixing some malformed globe-coordinate precisions in the database (phab:T283576)
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 an issue on the Vector skin with the text size of categories and notices under the page title. It was fixed last Monday. [71]
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 8 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 June. It will be on all wikis from 10 June (calendar).
Future changes
The Wikimedia movement uses Phabricator for technical tasks. This is where we collect technical suggestions, bugs and what developers are working on. The company behind Phabricator will stop working on it. This will not change anything for the Wikimedia movement now. It could lead to changes in the future. [72][73][74]
Searching on Wikipedia will find more results in some languages. This is mainly true for when those who search do not use the correct diacritics because they are not seen as necessary in that language. For example searching for Bedusz doesn't find Będusz on German Wikipedia. The character ę isn't used in German so many would write e instead. This will work better in the future in some languages. [75]
The CSRF token parameters in the action API were changed in 2014. The old parameters from before 2014 will stop working soon. This can affect bots, gadgets and user scripts that still use the old parameters. [76][77]
Sweden report: Working with UN Human Rights; Aftermath to the fiddler competition; Music manuscripts from the 18th century; Digital visions; Should museums work with Wikipedia?; Wikidata project with museums has results
SPARQL Jupyter notebooks in PAWS: PAWS is a wikitech services which allows to run Jupyter notebooks. There is a SPARQL kernel which makes it possible to run SPARQL queries. See this example notebook.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future.
WikidataCon 2021: A sustainable future for Wikidata. Information about "the conference theme, its three-day program structure and a special project on diversity taking place before the conference itself".
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Working on no longer using the Query Service to evaluate Constraints Checks regular expressions (this should make our checks faster and allow for further improvements) (phab:T176312)
Changing the rate limits for assigning Item IDs further, which should result in even fewer Q-IDs being skipped in the future (phab:T284538)
Finalizing the concepts for a tool to help work on mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/...
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
Logged-in users on the mobile web can choose to use the advanced mobile mode. They now see categories in a similar way as users on desktop do. This means that some gadgets that have just been for desktop users could work for users of the mobile site too. If your wiki has such gadgets you could decide to turn them on for the mobile site too. Some gadgets probably need to be fixed to look good on mobile. [78]
German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [80]
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes in the week of 28 June. More information will be published in Tech News later. It will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [81][82]
The next Wikibase live session is 16:00 UTC on Thursday 24th June 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month we'll have a team member from Wikibase Stakeholders Group talk briefly about their work, and then we'll welcome people to share out about their work around Wikibase. We'll leave some space in the agenda to discuss meta issues related to the Wikibase Community Usergroup.
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in English by Vigneron, June 22 at 18:00 CEST
The call for candidates for 2021 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections has begun on June 9. The last date to apply is June 29, 2021.
Since the beginning of the month, phabricator tickets about language codes (and names of languages) were reviewed and triaged to better reflect their content and current status. Some work was done to better identify the steps for such changes, highlight and address bottlenecks and system issues. Patches for a few codes were contributed and are being released. Phabricator "Language codes" workboard provides an overview, phab:T284856 attempts to identify maintenance steps and phab:T284276 determine turn-around times. phab:T284808 should finally close a gap in termbox language handeling. A way to better address some or all aspects of changes of language codes applicable to Wikipedia editions still needs to be found. Don't hesitate to request the addition or update of language names (e.g. the name of Dutch in Danish) or missing language codes, notably for monolingual strings (see Help:Monolingual text languages).
Fixed a bug that broke the "Add sitelink" popup on Commons (phab:T284854)
Working on a fix for suggesters popping up unexpectedly when tabbing quickly (phab:284219)
Reviewing code for a new Property Suggester by a student (phab:T284820)
Mismatch Finder: Working on a tool to work through mismatching data between Wikidata and external databases. Your feedback is welcome on Wikidata talk:Mismatch Finder
Curious Facts: We developed a tool to help editors check random curious facts on Wikidata. Try it and give us your feedback on Wikidata talk:Curious Facts
Kicked off our continued work on Wikidata-Wikibase federation (Federation v2) with preparatory work, including:
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 otrs-member group name is now vrt-permissions. This could affect abuse filters. [83]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit German Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage and 29 smaller wikis for a few minutes on 22 June. This is planned between 5:00 and 5:30 UTC. [84]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 June. It will be on all wikis from 24 June (calendar).
SPARQL queries live on Twitch and in French by Vigneron, June 28 at 18:00 CEST
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Robert Chavez (Northeastern University) will provide an introduction to SPARQL and using the Wikidata Query Service.; [85], June 29th.
Wikidata Community/Diversity 2021 Survey has been published. The results are meant to serve as a baseline to see how the community might (not) change in the future. Feel free to give us your feedback on this discussion page.
A new version of the Open Art Browser allows discovering works of art in the new section "Types", which presents you more than 1500 expressions of art. Explore it!
Mismatch Finder: We started building the foundation of the place that will store the mismatches between Wikidata and other databases/catalogs/...
Continued work on migrating the checks of regular expressions for constraints from SPARQL to a better solution to take that load off of the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
Made it possible to show language links from multilingual Wikisource to the other language versions of Wikisource (phab:T275958)
Added a new constraint type to indicate that a certain Property should only be used on Lexemes with a specific language (phab:T200689)
Fixed a weird issue with suggesters popping back up when they shouldn't (phab:T284219)
Invalid data will not be handled better in RDF outputs (phab:T285131)
Working on lowering the rate limit at which a misbehaving bot can waste new Item IDs to further reduce the percentage of skipped Item IDs (phab:T284538)
Working on not suggesting real Item IDs in the API sandbox to avoid accidental edits by people who think it is not making real edits (phab:T219215)
Working on reducing the time it takes between entering a value in a new statement and being able to save the statement (phab:T281669)
Improved documentation of the usage tracking aspects in API help pages. Usage tracking is an internal mechanism to track which article on Wikipedia etc uses which data from an Item on Wikidata. (phab:T283040)
Language codes for monolingual strings "gsw-fr", "ykg", "wya", "osa-latn" were made available: Alsatian, Tundra Yukaghir, Wendat, Osage (phab:T262922, phab:T252198, phab:T283364, phab:T265297)
The English name for language code "crh" and the Swedish name for "fa" were corrected (phab:T240350, phab:T281702)
Lexeme language codes ha-arab, sux-latn, sux-xsux, gsg, tlh-piqd, tlh-latn, bfi, pwn, enm were added. That is Hausa in Arabic script, Sumerian in cuneiform and Latin-script, German Sign Language, Klingon in pIqaD and Latin script, British Sign Language, Paiwan and Middle English. (phab:T282512, phab:T279557)
It was determined that language codes can be activated for Wikidata while being blocked for use on Incubator (phab:T273705), this to avoid projects such as a "British English Wikipedia"
Language code "es-419" for Latin American Spanish has been available for labels and descriptions for quite some time (phab:T230786)
A possibly confusing Russian mis-translation of the name of the language code for "multiple languages" (mul) is being reviewed (phab:T245927)
"en-simple:" can be used instead of "simple:" to link to Simple Wikipedia. Query Services outputs "en-simple", not "simple" for sitelinks to Simple Wikipedia (phab:T283149).
There was some discussion about the creation of a language code "en-in" for monolingual strings, but "en-in" as interface language seems to be preferred (phab:T212313)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Wikisources have a new OCR tool. If you don't want to see the "extract text" button on Wikisource you can add .ext-wikisource-ExtractTextWidget { display: none; } to your common.css page. [87]
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit the Wikimedia wikis for a few minutes on 29 June. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. [88][89]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 June. It will be on all wikis from 1 July (calendar).
Future changes
Threshold for stub link formatting, thumbnail size and auto-number headings can be set in preferences. They are expensive to maintain and few editors use them. The developers are planning to remove them. Removing them will make pages load faster. You can read more and give feedback.
A toolbar will be added to the Reply tool's wikitext source mode. This will make it easier to link to pages and to ping other users. [90][91]
User:Nikki/AnchorLinks.js is a userscript that adds a small link before property labels and statement values on entity pages to provide a clickable/copiable link to that section of the page.
Other Noteworthy Stuff
A job opening for a fullstack developer to work on integrating Wikidata with expert-curated knowledge on invasion biology
Mismatch Finder: We continued the work on building the basic store that in the future will hold mismatches between Wikidata's data and other databases/websites/catalogs/... These mismatches will then be used in the Mismatch Finder website and other tools to easily review them.
Improved the namespace behavior of the CommonsLink constraint so that it now produces less false positives (phab:T237920)
Working on adding a magic word to allow pages to be excluded from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedias and co (phab:T97577)
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 19 July.
Recent changes
AutoWikiBrowser is a tool to make repetitive tasks easier. It now uses JSON. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPageJSON and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Config. Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/Version has moved to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage/VersionJSON. The tool will eventually be configured on the wiki so that you don't have to wait until the new version to add templates or regular expression fixes. [92]
Problems
InternetArchiveBot helps saving online sources on some wikis. It adds them to Wayback Machine and links to them there. This is so they don't disappear if the page that was linked to is removed. It currently has a problem with linking to the wrong date when it moves pages from archive.is to web.archive.org. [93]
Changes later this week
The tool to find, add and remove templates will be updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It will come to the first wikis on 7 July. It will come to more wikis later this year. [94][95]
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
Future changes
Some Wikimedia wikis use Flagged Revisions or pending changes. It hides edits from new and unregistered accounts for readers until they have been patrolled. The auto review action in Flagged Revisions will no longer be logged. All old logs of auto-review will be removed. This is because it creates a lot of logs that are not very useful. [96]
LIBER 2021 - Panel Discussion: Why use Wikidata or not - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata divers. Session of Tuesday, June 29 (in French) - YouTube
SPARQL Wikidata Wikisource. Tuesday, July 6 session (in French) - YouTube
Upcoming:
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; [97], July 13th.
模板:Q, by Kartik Shenoy et al, published 1 July 2021, explores the use of three indicators - deleted statements that are not replaced; deprecated statements; and constraint violations - as a framework for evaluating data quality.
Wikidata Workshop by Juan Antonio Pastor at the University of Murcia (in Spanish) - YouTube
Tool of the week
Schafe vorm Fenster is a project to build up a calendar for rural villages in Vorpommern-Greifswald using Wikidata to get images and short descriptions for the villages. (See example)
OpenRefine has two Junior Developer job openings (paid contractor positions; part-time, fully remote) for building Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons functionality
Mismatch Finder (a tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and other databases): We continued initial development of the store part of the tool. We focused on the upload of new mismatches. (phab:project/view/5422)
Discussion on how do describe the types of mismatches reviewed in Mismatch Finder (phab:T285849)
We introduced a magic word that can be used to exclude a page from Special:UnconnectedPages on Wikipedia and co. This will make the special page more useful to find pages on Wikipedia and co that should be added to an Item on Wikidata as sitelinks. (phab:T97577).
We reduced the number of Wikidata edits that show up in the watchlist and recent changes of Wikipedia and co by not triggering entries for a number of Wikidata edits that do not influence the article (phab:T286193)
Property Suggester: We are reviewing patches by a student working on an improved Property Suggester.
Working on improving how deprecated statements are handled when checking “type” and “value type” constraints" (phab:T170401)
Working on fixing a bug where the entity suggestions are opened when a valid value is already selected (phab:T285102)
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 tool to find, add and remove templates was updated. This is to make it easier to find and use the right templates. It was supposed to come to the first wikis on 7 July. It was delayed to 12 July instead. It will come to more wikis later this year. [98][99]
Special:UnconnectedPages lists pages that are not connected to Wikidata. This helps you find pages that can be connected to Wikidata items. Some pages should not be connected to Wikidata. You can use the magic word __EXPECTED_UNCONNECTED_PAGE__ on pages that should not be listed on the special page. [100]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 July. It will be on all wikis from 22 July (calendar).
Future changes
How media is structured in the parser's HTML output will soon change. This can affect bots, gadgets, user scripts and extensions. You can read more. You can test it on Testwiki or Testwiki 2.
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.
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Carlo Bianchini (University of Pavia), Stefano Bargioni (Pontifical University Santa Croce (Rome)), and Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (University of Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore) will discuss their recent project and article “Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries”.; July 13th.
The next Wikidata+Wikibase office hours will take place on Wednesday 28th July 2021 at 16:00 UTC (18:00 Berlin time) in the Wikidata Telegram group. This month we will also be having a guest presentation about Toolhub by Srishti Sethi from the Wikimedia Foundation.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 29th July 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). This month, we welcome Luca Mauri to give a presentation about installing Wikibase from scratch.
Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Andra Waagmeester on work with Shape Expressions in Wikidata to describe the genomics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; [101], July 27th.
COSCUP 2021 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 2020.07.31-08.01 Online website, Meta-wiki
Still mapping!"Our team has been working continuously on improving the number of Welsh place names that appear online since our inception in 2017 as partt of the Welsh Government’s Welsh Government #Cymraeg2050 project"..."we will also use Wikidata to store and share Welsh language information".
Added a tags parameter to the wbmergeitems API so Item merges can now also get an edit tag (T286778)
Mismatch Finder: Continued working on the store part. This week we focused on uploading a file with potential mismatches and the UI for getting a list of all uploaded mismatch files.
Addressing comments from the security review of the Query Builder so we can hopefully soon move it from the test system to its proper place under query.wikidata.org
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 version of MediaWiki came to the Wikimedia wikis the week before last week. This was not in Tech News because there was no newsletter that week.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 July. It will be on all wikis from 29 July (calendar).
Future changes
If you use the Monobook skin you can choose to switch off responsive design on mobile. This will now work for more skins. If ⧼monobook-responsive-label⧽ is unticked you need to also untick the new preference啟用響應模式. Otherwise it will stop working. Interface admins can automate this process on your wiki. You can read more.
Advisory board call for members for the Web2Cit project: Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators project is moving! With Diegodlh we are inviting people to apply to be an Advisory Board member. Is this you? Is this someone you know? Check the Call for members and apply to be an Advisory Board member before August 6th!. If you are too busy this time around to apply, don't worry: we get it. You can also help us by spreading the word!
The moveClaim.js user script has been updated using code created by Melderick to support changing a property of a claim within an entity. Please switch to the updated version if you used the other one, and report any bugs.
New tool: Lexemes Party displays lexemes linked to a list of Wikidata items, so you can improve related lexicographical data in the languages you know. You can build your own lists and several examples are available. A weekly challenge is also proposed, theme of the week: Olympic Games.
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 your wiki uses markup like <div class="mw-content-ltr"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl"> without the required dir attribute, then these will no longer work in 2 weeks. There is a short-term fix that can be added to your local wiki's Common.css page, which is explained at T287701. From now on, all usages should include the full attributes, for example: <div class="mw-content-ltr" dir="ltr" lang="en"> or <div class="mw-content-rtl" dir="rtl" lang="he">. This also applies to some other HTML tags, such as span or code. You can find existing examples on your wiki that need to be updated, using the instructions at T287701.
Last week, all wikis had slow access or no access for 30 minutes. There was a problem with generating dynamic lists of articles on the Russian Wikinews, due to the bulk import of 200,000+ new articles over 3 days, which led to database problems. The problematic feature has been disabled on that wiki and developers are discussing if it can be fixed properly. [102][103]
Changes later this week
When adding links to a page using VisualEditor or the 2017 wikitext editor, disambiguation pages will now only appear at the bottom of search results. This is because users do not often want to link to disambiguation pages. [104]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 August. It will be on all wikis from 5 August (calendar).
Future changes
The team of the Wikipedia app for Android is working on communication in the app. The developers are working on how to talk to other editors and get notifications. You can read more. They are looking for users who want to test the plans. Any editor who has an Android phone and is willing to download the app can do this.
The Beta Feature for 討論工具 will be updated in the coming weeks. You will be able to subscribe to individual sections on a talk page at more wikis. You can test this now by adding ?dtenable=1 to the end of the talk page's URL (example).
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Wikidata Edit-a-thons highlighting Boston Rock City Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Comics Edit-a-thon, and Wiki-Relays [105], Aug 10th.
LD4 Wikibase Working Hour - Next steps after installing a Wikibase instance -- creating users, items, and properties. Friday, August 27th, 2021 / 1PM (time zone converter). Registration: Please fill in ZOOM Registration Link to register
Wikimania 2021, August 13 to 17, online event. On this page you can find a summary of sessions and community gatherings related to Wikidata and Wikibase.
Mismatch Finder: Finishing work on importing mismatches and moved on to building the API for retrieving mismatches from the mismatch store.
Added tags for all edits done through the UI to more easily distinguish them from edits made through tools and other means (phab:T236893)
Moved regular expression checking for constraints from the SPARQL endpoint to a dedicated service to make it faster and put less stress on the SPARQL endpoint (phab:T176312)
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
You can read but not edit 17 wikis for a few minutes on 10 August. This is planned at 05:00 UTC. This is because of work on the database. [106]
Changes later this week
The Wikimania Hackathon will take place remotely on 13 August, starting at 5:00 UTC, for 24 hours. You can participate in many ways. You can still propose projects and sessions.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 August. It will be on all wikis from 12 August (calendar).
The old CSS <div class="visualClear"></div> will not be supported after 12 August. Instead, templates and pages should use <div style="clear:both;"></div>. Please help to replace any existing uses on your wiki. There are global-search links available at T287962.
Future changes
The Wikipedia Library is a place for Wikipedia editors to get access to sources. There is an extension which has a new function to tell users when they can take part in it. It will use notifications. It will start pinging the first users in September. It will ping more users later. [107]
Additionally, De Gruyter and Nomos have been centralised from their previous on-wiki signup location on the German Wikipedia. Many other collections are freely available by simply logging in to The Wikipedia Library with your Wikimedia login!
We are also excited to announce that the first version of a new design for My Library was deployed this week. We will be iterating on this design with more features over the coming weeks. Read more on the project page on Meta.
Lastly, an Echo notification will begin rolling out soon to notify eligible editors about the library (T132084). If you can translate the notification please do so at TranslateWiki!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 2021年8月11日 (禮拜三) 13:23 (UTC)
Mismatch Finder: We are making good progress on the tool. We made it possible to retrieve mismatches that are in the store part of the tool via an API.
Regular expressions in constraints are now no longer checked via the Query Service. The checks have been completely moved over to a dedicated service for regular expression checking. (phab:T204031)
Edits made via the user interface (as opposed to with tools, bots, etc.) are now tagged as such to make them easier to filter (example - edits made to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are still missing but will follow soon)
Working on allowing to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
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 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. [109]
Problems
There was a problem on wikis which use the Translate extension. Translations were not updated or were replaced with the English text. The problems have been fixed. [110][111][112]
Changes later this week
A revision tag will soon be added to edits that add links to disambiguation pages. This is because these links are usually added by accident. The tag will allow editors to easily find the broken links and fix them. If your wiki does not like this feature, it can be hidden. [113]
Would you like to help improve the information about tools? Would you like to attend or help organize a small virtual meetup for your community to discuss the list of tools? Please get in touch on the Toolhub Quality Signal Sessions talk page. We are also looking for feedback from tool maintainers on some specific questions.
In the past, edits to any page in your user talk space ignored your mute list, e.g. sub-pages. Starting this week, this is only true for edits to your talk page. [114]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 August. It will be on all wikis from 19 August (calendar).
The next Wikibase live session is at 16:00 UTC on Thursday 26th August 2021 (18:00 Berlin time). You're welcome to come and share your work around Wikibase.
BiCIKL Hackathon at the Meise Botanic Garden, September 20 - 24. Theme: adding articles/items about “Hidden women in science” on Wikipedia/Wikidata. If you're interested to participate, please write to maarten.trekels@plantentuinmeise.be
50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights - In this series of 5 articles we show the added value of putting images and metadata of digitised collection highlights of the KB, national library of the Netherlands, into the Wikimedia infrastructure. By putting our collection highlights into Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, dozens of new functionalities have been added. As a result of Wikifying this collection in 2020, you can now do things with these highlights that were not possible before. Article by OlafJanssen, DanielleJWiki and 1Veertje_(KB)
The "Wikidata Quickstatements" translator which lets users transfer metadata about citation sources fromZotero into Wikidata, no longer needs to be manually installed. Existing manually-installed versions should update automatically, like other translators.
Edits to labels, descriptions and aliases on mobile are now also tagged as edits made via the user interface. All edits made via the user interface are now tagged as such. (phab:T286775)
ArticlePlaceholder pages will now indicate that they are generated by the ArticlePlaceholder thanks to a patch by Luca (phab:T124191)
Working on making it possible to restrict constraints to certain entity types (phab:T269724)
Adding a new constraint type to ensure Items have a label in a certain language (phab:T195178)
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 Score extension (<score> notation) has been re-enabled on public wikis and upgraded to a newer version. Some musical score functionality may no longer work because the extension is only enabled in "safe mode". The security issue has been fixed and an advisory published.
Problems
You will be able to read but not edit some wikis for a few minutes on 25 August. This will happen around 06:00 UTC. This is for database maintenance. During this time, operations on the CentralAuth will also not be possible.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 August. It will be on all wikis from 26 August (calendar).
This will affect your wiki as well as 11 other wikis. During this time, publishing edits will not be possible.
Also during this time, operations on the CentralAuth will not be possible (GlobalRenames, changing/confirming e-mail addresses, logging into new wikis, password changes).
For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.
A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.
Please help your community to be aware of this maintenance operation. 感謝您！
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:繪製樂譜錯誤的頁面 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. [115]
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. [116]
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. [117], 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. [118]
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. [119][120]
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.
France report: Wikimedian in residence; Some projects for this autumn
India report: Second proofread competition starts on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library
Italy report: Summer school in July and two new WiR in August
Netherlands report: 50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights, and New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco by Angeline van Achterberg
This is the announcement for the Project Grants program open call that started on January 11, with the submission deadline of February 10, 2021. This first open call will be focussed on Community Organizing proposals. A second open call focused on research and software proposals is scheduled from February 15 with a submission deadline of March 16, 2021.
For the Round 1 open call, we invite you to propose grant applications that fall under community development and organizing (offline and online) categories. Project Grant funds are available to support individuals, groups, and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, from organizing a better process on your wiki, coordinating a campaign or editathon series to providing other support for community building. We offer the following resources to help you plan your project and complete a grant proposal:
Weekly proposals clinics via Zoom during the Open Call. Join us for #Upcoming_Proposal_Clinics|real-time discussions with Program Officers and select thematic experts and get live feedback about your Project Grants proposal. We’ll answer questions and help you make your proposal better. We also offer these support pages to help you build your proposal:
Program officers are also available to offer individualized proposal support upon request. Contact us if you would like feedback or more information.
We are excited to see your grant ideas that will support our community and make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. Put your idea into motion, and submit your proposal by February 10, 2021!
Please feel free to get in touch with questions about getting started with your grant application, or about serving on the Project Grants Committee. Contact us at projectgrantswikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery（討論） 2021年1月28日 (禮拜四) 08:01 (UTC)[回覆]
You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2021 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 28th of February.
You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.
Please support us in translating the project page and a banner message to help us spread the word in your native language.
France report: Wikimedian in residence; Some projects for this autumn
India report: Second proofread competition starts on Bengali Wikisource in collaboration with the British Library
Italy report: Summer school in July and two new WiR in August
Netherlands report: 50 cool new things you can now do with KB’s collection highlights, and New old photographs of Algeria, Mali and Morocco by Angeline van Achterberg
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. [123]
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. [124]
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. [125][126]
Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Bionomia and maintaining Wikidata synchrony with David Shorthouse (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada). [127], 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. [128]
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. [129]
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. [130]
Future changes
The Reply tool will be deployed to the remaining wikis in the coming weeks. It is currently part of "討論工具" in Beta features at most wikis. You will be able to turn it off in Editing Preferences. [131]
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. [132]
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. [133]
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. [135]
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. [136]
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. [137]
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. [138]
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). [139], 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.
Tools play an essential role for the Wikimedia projects, and so do the many volunteer developers who experiment with new ideas and develop and maintain local and global solutions to support the Wikimedia communities. The Coolest Tool Award aims to recognize and celebrate the coolest tools in a variety of categories.
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. [140]
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. [141]
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. [142]
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. [143][144]
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.
Sweden report: The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk; More museum data on Wikidata; LGBT edit-a-thon; Local business history in Nyköping; Stockholm City Museum ♥ Wikipedia; Writing about fashion at Nordiska museet
UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections
USA report: Wikiconference North America + Workshops
Content Partnerships Hub report: Needs assessment interviews; Cultural heritage on Wikidata – thousands of monuments in Norway; Structured Data uploads continue
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. [146]
There was a problem with search last week. Many search requests did not work for 2 hours because of a configuration error. [147]
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. [148]
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. [149]
Ukraine report: Aricle contest for librarians «Local cultural heritage and prominent people»
USA report: Smithsonian demos new Wiki API Connector tool and other meetups
Content Partnerships Hub report: We continue building for the hub; SDC for fun and profit: detecting bad coordinates; Needs assessment – video recorded interviews; Improving ISA
WMF GLAM report: Wikisource birthday celebration, Community Tech Wishlist, and upcoming conversation about courses for GLAM professionals
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. [150]
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. [151]
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. [152]
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 Board of Trustees is preparing a call for feedback about the upcoming Board Elections, from January 7 - February 10, 2022.
While details will be finalized the week before the call, we have confirmed at least two questions that will be asked during this call for feedback:
What is the best way to ensure fair representation of emerging communities among the Board?
What involvement should candidates have during the election?
While additional questions may be added, the Movement Strategy and Governance team wants to provide time for community members and affiliates to consider and prepare ideas on the confirmed questions before the call opens. We apologize for not having a complete list of questions at this time. The list of questions should only grow by one or two questions. The intention is to not overwhelm the community with requests, but provide notice and welcome feedback on these important questions.
Do you want to help organize local conversation during this Call?
Reach out if you have any questions or concerns. The Movement Strategy and Governance team will be minimally staffed until January 3. Please excuse any delayed response during this time. We also recognize some community members and affiliates are offline during the December holidays. We apologize if our message has reached you while you are on holiday.
Among anyone and everyone you know who has an account on wiki.
Promote the Survey on social media, via instant messaging apps, in other groups and chats, in your WikiProject, Wikimedia affiliate - wherever contributors with registered accounts may be.
Only you can make the difference
How many people will hear and read about the Survey in their language? How many will decide to participate? Will there be enough of you to vote for a change you would like to see? It all depends on you, volunteers.
Thousands of volunteers haven't participated in the Survey yet. We'd like to improve that, too. Three years ago, 1387 people participated. Last year, there were 1773 of them. We hope that in the upcoming edition, there will be even more. You are better than us in contacting Wikimedians outside of wikis. We have prepared some images to share. More to come.
What is the Community Wishlist Survey?
It's an annual survey that allows contributors to the Wikimedia projects to propose and vote for tools and platform improvements. Long years of experience in editing or technical skills are not required.
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. [153]
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. [154]
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. [155]
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. [156]
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. [160]
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.
Greetings! You are invited to participate in Feminism and Folklore 2022 writing competion. This year Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women biographies and gender-focused topics for the project in league with Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus with folk culture theme on Wikipedia.
You can help us in enriching the folklore documentation on Wikipedia from your region by creating or improving articles focused on folklore around the world, including, but not limited to folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer personalities in folklore, folk culture (folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales and more. You can contribute to new articles or translate from the list of suggested articles here.
You can also support us in organizing the contest on your local Wikipedia by signing up your community to participate in this project and also translating the project page and help us spread the word in your native language.
Learn more about the contest and prizes from our project page. Feel free to contact us on our talk page or via Email if you need any assistance...
This award is highlighting software tools that have been nominated by contributors to the Wikimedia projects. The ceremony will be a nice moment to show appreciation to our tool developers and maybe discover new tools!
The Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections is now open and will close on 7 February 2022.
With this Call for Feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team is taking a different approach. This approach incorporates community feedback from 2021. Instead of leading with proposals, the Call is framed around key questions from the Board of Trustees. The key questions came from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election. The intention is to inspire collective conversation and collaborative proposal development about these key questions.
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 "檢視連結" 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. [162]
Events
You can see the results of the Coolest Tool Award 2021 and learn more about 14 tools which were selected this year.
We are calling all organizers, Wikimedia affiliates, and individuals to help us organize the WikiForHumanRights 2022 campaign this year, which focuses once again on the Right to a Healthy Environment, the newest human right to be recognized by the UN.
Interested but not sure how or what to do? Need help in getting started? Join our regional support hour for Asian communities and learn everything you need to know to begin taking action. We will have representatives from the community resource team talk about what you need to know about the funding opportunities for your campaign. You can read our new post on diff.
Welcome to the fifth issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News (formerly known as Universal Code of Conduct News)! This revamped newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the Movement Charter, Universal Code of Conduct, Movement Strategy Implementation grants, Board elections and other relevant MSG topics.
This Newsletter will be distributed quarterly, while more frequent Updates will also be delivered weekly or bi-weekly to subscribers. Please remember to subscribe here if you would like to receive these updates.
Call for Feedback about the Board elections - We invite you to give your feedback on the upcoming WMF Board of Trustees election. This call for feedback went live on 10th January 2022 and will be concluded on 16th February 2022. (continue reading)
Universal Code of Conduct Ratification - In 2021, the WMF asked communities about how to enforce the Universal Code of Conduct policy text. The revised draft of the enforcement guidelines should be ready for community vote in March. (continue reading)
Movement Strategy Implementation Grants - As we continue to review several interesting proposals, we encourage and welcome more proposals and ideas that target a specific initiative from the Movement Strategy recommendations. (continue reading)
The New Direction for the Newsletter - As the UCoC Newsletter transitions into MSG Newsletter, join the facilitation team in envisioning and deciding on the new directions for this newsletter. (continue reading)
Diff Blogs - Check out the most recent publications about MSG on Wikimedia Diff. (continue reading)
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). [163]
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.
Many participants from across the movement have provided valuable input in these ongoing conversations. The UCoC and MSG teams want to thank the Drafting Committee and the community members for their contributions to this process.
Sincerely,
Movement Strategy and Governance
Wikimedia Foundation
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. [164]
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).
The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation is supporting the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Task Force. The purpose of the task force is to advise leadership development work.
The team is looking for feedback about the responsibilities of the Leadership Development Task Force. This Meta page shares the proposal for a Leadership Development Task Force and how you can help. Feedback on the proposal will be collected from 7 to 25 February 2022.
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. [165]
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. [166]
Over the next months we will gradually change the audio and video player of Wikis from Kultura to Video.js and with that, the old player won’t be accessible anymore. The new player has been active as a beta feature since May 2017.
The new player has many advantages, including better design, consistent look with the rest of our interface, better compatibility with browsers, ability to work on mobile which means our multimedia will be properly accessible on iPhone, better accessibility and many more.
The old player has been unmaintained for eight years now and is home-brewn (unlike the new player which is a widely used open source project) and uses deprecated and abandoned frameworks such as jQuery UI. Removing the old player’s code also improves performance of the Wikis for anyone visiting any page (by significantly reducing complexity of the dependency graph of our ResourceLoader modules. See this blog post.). The old player has many open bugs that we will be able to close as resolved after this migration.
The new player will solve a lot of old and outstanding issues but also it will have its own bugs. All important ones have been fixed but there will be some small ones to tackle in the future and after the rollout.
What we are asking now is to turn on the beta feature for the new player and let us know about any issues.
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. [168]
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]]. [169]
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. [170][171]
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. [172]
Greetings from Wiki Loves Folklore International Team,
We are pleased to inform you that Wiki Loves Folklore an international photographic contest on Wikimedia Commons has been extended till the 15th of March 2022. The scope of the contest is focused on folk culture of different regions on categories, such as, but not limited to, folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, etc.
We would like to have your immense participation in the photographic contest to document your local Folk culture on Wikipedia. You can also help with the translation of project pages and share a word in your local language.
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.
Job opening: The Search Platform team is looking for someone to maintain and develop WDQS. Apply here!
Job opening: 模板:Q is looking for someone for project- and data management especially for Wikidata related stuff about the museums collections Job Description (German)
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. [174][175]
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. [176]
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.
A vote in SecurePoll from 7 to 21 March 2022 is scheduled as part of the ratification process for the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) Enforcement guidelines. Eligible voters are invited to answer a poll question and share comments. Read voter information and eligibility details. During the poll, voters will be asked if they support the enforcement of the Universal Code of Conduct based on the proposed guidelines.
There are events scheduled to learn more and discuss:
A community panel recorded on 18 February 2022 shares perspectives from small- and medium-sized community participants.
The Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team is hosting Conversation Hours on 4 March 2022 at 15:00 UTC. Please sign-up to interact with the project team and the drafting committee about the updated enforcement guidelines and the ratification process. See the Conversation Hour summaries for notes from 4 February 2022 and 25 February 2022.
You can comment on Meta-wiki talk pages in any language. You may also contact either team by email: msgwikimedia.org or ucocprojectwikimedia.org
Sincerely,
Movement Strategy and Governance
Wikimedia Foundation
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.
The development team at WMDE is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to develop and improve the software behind the Wikidata project. Apply here!
The WMF Search Platform team is looking for someone to maintain and develop Wikidata Query Service. Apply here!
模板:Q is looking for someone for project- and data management especially for Wikidata related stuff about the museums collections Job Description (German)
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. [177]
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).
The Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) provides a baseline of acceptable behavior for the entire movement. The revised enforcement guidelines were published 24 January 2022 as a proposed way to apply the policy across the movement. You can read more about the UCoC project.
You can also comment on Meta-wiki talk pages in any language. You may also contact the team by email: ucocprojectwikimedia.org
The Movement Strategy and Governance team of the Wikimedia Foundation would like to invite you to the next event about "Regional and Thematic Hubs". The Wikimedia Movement is in the process of understanding what Regional and Thematic Hubs should be. Our workshop in November was a good start (read the report), but we're not finished yet.
Over the last weeks we conducted about 16 interviews with groups working on establishing a Hub in their context (see Hubs Dialogue). These interviews informed a report that will serve as a foundation for discussion on March 12. The report is planned to be published on March 9.
The event will take place on March 12, 13:00 to 16:00 UTC on Zoom. Interpretation will be provided in French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese. Registration is open, and will close on March 10. Anyone interested in the topic is invited to join us. More information on the event on Meta-wiki.
International photographic contest Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 ends on 15th March 2022 23:59:59 UTC. This is the last chance of the year to upload images about local folk culture, festival, cuisine, costume, folklore etc on Wikimedia Commons. Watch out our social media handles for regular updates and declaration of Winners.
The writing competition Feminism and Folklore will run till 31st of March 2022 23:59:59 UTC. Write about your local folk tradition, women, folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, folklore, and tradition, including ballads, folktales, fairy tales, legends, traditional song and dance, folk plays, games, seasonal events, calendar customs, folk arts, folk religion, mythology etc. on your local Wikipedia. Check if your local Wikipedia is participating
A special competition called Wiki Loves Falles is organised in Spain and the world during 15th March 2022 till 15th April 2022 to document local folk culture and Falles in Valencia, Spain. Learn more about it on Catalan Wikipedia project page.
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. [178][179]
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. [180]
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 特別:修訂刪除 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. [182]
On the 特別:取消刪除 pages for diffs and revisions, there will be a link back to the main Undelete page with the list of revisions. [183]
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.
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. [186]
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. [187]
Feminism and Folklore 2022 which is an international writing contest organized at Wikipedia ends soon that is on 31 March 2022 11:59 UTC. This is the last chance of the year to write about feminism, women biographies and gender-focused topics such as folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, fairy tales, folk plays, folk arts, folk religion, mythology, folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales and more
Keep an eye on the project page for declaration of Winners.
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). [188][189]
The ratification voting process for the revised enforcement guidelines of the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) came to a close on 21 March 2022. Over 2300 Wikimedians voted across different regions of our movement. Thank you to everyone who participated in this process! The scrutinizing group is now reviewing the vote for accuracy, so please allow up to two weeks for them to finish their work.
The final results from the voting process will be announced here, along with the relevant statistics and a summary of comments as soon as they are available. Please check out the voter information page to learn about the next steps. You can comment on the project talk page on Meta-wiki in any language. You may also contact the UCoC project team by email: ucocprojectwikimedia.org
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 特別:最晏嗰改動 feed. This bug has been fixed. [190]
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. [191]
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. [192][193]
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).
India report: Wikimedian-in-Residence program initiated at the Research Institute of World's Ancient Traditions, Cultures and Heritage in Arunachal Pradesh
Italy report: The growth of sharing on Wikimedia projects
Netherlands report: Letters from Sierra Leone: the Sjoerd Hofstra photo collection in a new light
New Zealand report: Forming Wikimedia Aotearoa and the Aotearoa New Zealand Theses Project
Serbia report: News in Wikipedian in residence projects
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. [194]
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.
Welcome to the sixth issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News! This revamped newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the Movement Charter, Universal Code of Conduct, Movement Strategy Implementation grants, Board of trustees elections and other relevant MSG topics.
This Newsletter will be distributed quarterly, while the more frequent Updates will also be delivered weekly. Please remember to subscribe here if you would like to receive future issues of this newsletter.
Leadership Development - A Working Group is Forming! - The application to join the Leadership Development Working Group closed on April 10th, 2022, and up to 12 community members will be selected to participate in the working group. (continue reading)
Universal Code of Conduct Ratification Results are out! - The global decision process on the enforcement of the UCoC via SecurePoll was held from 7 to 21 March. Over 2,300 eligible voters from at least 128 different home projects submitted their opinions and comments. (continue reading)
Movement Discussions on Hubs - The Global Conversation event on Regional and Thematic Hubs was held on Saturday, March 12, and was attended by 84 diverse Wikimedians from across the movement. (continue reading)
Movement Strategy Grants Remain Open! - Since the start of the year, six proposals with a total value of about $80,000 USD have been approved. Do you have a movement strategy project idea? Reach out to us! (continue reading)
The Movement Charter Drafting Committee is All Set! - The Committee of fifteen members which was elected in October 2021, has agreed on the essential values and methods for its work, and has started to create the outline of the Movement Charter draft. (continue reading)
Introducing Movement Strategy Weekly - Contribute and Subscribe! - The MSG team have just launched the updates portal, which is connected to the various Movement Strategy pages on Meta-wiki. Subscriber to get up-to-date news about the various ongoing projects. (continue reading)
Diff Blogs - Check out the most recent publications about Movement Strategy on Wikimedia Diff. (continue reading)
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. [199][200]
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. [201]
Wiley – journals, books, and research resources, covering life, health, social, and physical sciences
OECD – OECD iLibrary, Data, and Multimedia published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
SPIE Digital Library – journals and eBooks on optics and photonics applied research
Many other sources are freely available for experienced editors, including collections which recently became accessible to all eligible editors: Cambridge University Press, BMJ, AAAS, Érudit and more.
Do better research and help expand the use of high quality references across Wikipedia projects: log in today!
--The Wikipedia Library Team 2022年4月26日 (禮拜二) 13:16 (UTC)
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.” [202]
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. [203][204]
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. [209]
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. [210]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [211]
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).
Sweden report: Training at the National Archives of Sweden; Training at the Stockholm City Museum; Training at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology; Improved images from Swedish Performing Arts Agency
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation's operations. Community-and-affiliate selected trustees and Board-appointed trustees make up the Board of Trustees. Each trustee serves a three year term. The Wikimedia community has the opportunity to vote for community-and-affiliate selected trustees.
The Wikimedia community will vote to fill two seats on the Board in 2022. This is an opportunity to improve the representation, diversity, and expertise of the Board as a team.
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. [213]
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. [214]
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. [216]
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. [217]
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. [218]
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. [219]
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. [220][221]
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. [222]
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. [223]
We'd like to provide an update on the work on the Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct. After the conclusion of the community vote on the guidelines in March, the Community Affairs committee (CAC) of the Board asked that several areas of the guidelines be reviewed for improvements before the Board does its final review. These areas were identified based on community discussions and comments provided during the vote. The CAC also requested review of the controversial Note in 3.1 of the UCoC itself.
Once more, a big thank you to all who voted, especially to all who left constructive feedback and comments! The project team is working with the Board to establish a timeline for this work, and will communicate this next month.
Wikimedians have provided many valuable comments together with the vote and in other conversations. Given the size and diversity of the Wikimedia community, there are even more voices out there who can give ideas on how to improve the enforcement guidelines and add even more valuable ideas to the process. To help the Revisions committee identify improvements, input on several questions for the committee’s review is requested. Visit the Meta-wiki pages (Enforcement Guidelines revision discussions, Policy text revision discussions) to get your ideas to the Committee - it is very important that viewpoints are heard from different communities before the Committee begins drafting revision proposals.
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).
Kosovo report: Cooperation with the National Gallery of Kosova and Summer of Wikivoyage 2022
Malaysia report: WikiGap Malaysia 2022 @ Kuala Lumpur Library
New Zealand report: Pacific Arts Aotearoa Wikiproject, Auckland Museum's Exploratory Study and Report back on #1Lib1Ref
Poland report: Wikipedian in residence in the National Museum in Cracow; Training at the Wawel Royal Castle National Art Collection; How can we make GLAM’s digital resources more reusable in education?; The International Museum Day 2022 Wikidata Competition
Sweden report: Rembrandt and others – drawings from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Stockholm Museum of Women’s History; The map book of Heinrich Thome; Sörmland Museum; Wikidata competition – International Museum Day 2022
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)
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)
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.
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. [238] should have a wiki commons link to [239] since they both refer to [240].
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. [241]
Italy report: Opening and closing projects in June
Kosovo report: Edit-a-thon with Kino Lumbardhi; DokuTech; CEE Spring 2022 in Albania and Kosovo
New Zealand report: West Coast Wikipedian at Large and Auckland Museum updates
Poland report: Wikipedian in residence in the National Museum in Cracow; The next online meeting within the cycle of monthly editing GLAM meetings; Steps to communicate GLAM partnerships better and involve the Wikimedian community
Sweden report: 100 000 memories from the Nordic Museum; Report from the Swedish National Archives
USA report: Fifty Women Sculptors; Juneteenth Edit-a-thon; Juneteenth Photobooths 2022; Wiknic June 2022; New York Botanical Garden June 2022; LGBT Pride Month
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.
An Election Compass is a tool to help voters select the candidates that best align with their beliefs and views. The community members will propose statements for the candidates to answer using a Lickert scale (agree/neutral/disagree). The candidates’ answers to the statements will be loaded into the Election Compass tool. Voters will use the tool by entering in their answer to the statements (agree/disagree/neutral). The results will show the candidates that best align with the voter’s beliefs and views.
Here is the timeline for the Election Compass
July 8 - 20: Community members propose statements for the Election Compass
July 21 - 22: Elections Committee reviews statements for clarity and removes off-topic statements
July 23 - August 1: Volunteers vote on the statements
August 2 - 4: Elections Committee selects the top 15 statements
August 5 - 12: candidates align themselves with the statements
August 15: The Election Compass opens for voters to use to help guide their voting decision
The Elections Committee will select the top 15 statements at the beginning of August. The Elections Committee will oversee the process, supported by the Movement Strategy and Governance team. MSG will check that the questions are clear, there are no duplicates, no typos, and so on.
Best,
Movement Strategy and Governance
This message was sent on behalf of the Board Selection Task Force and the Elections Committee
Welcome to the 7th issue of Movement Strategy and Governance News! The newsletter distributes relevant news and events about the implementation of Wikimedia's Movement Strategy recommendations, other relevant topics regarding Movement governance, as well as different projects and activities supported by the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The MSG Newsletter is delivered quarterly, while the more frequent Movement Strategy Weekly will be delivered weekly. Please remember to subscribe here if you would like to receive future issues of this newsletter.
Movement sustainability: Wikimedia Foundation's annual sustainability report has been published. (continue reading)
Improving user experience: recent improvements on the desktop interface for Wikimedia projects. (continue reading)
Safety and inclusion: updates on the revision process of the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines. (continue reading)
Equity in decisionmaking: reports from Hubs pilots conversations, recent progress from the Movement Charter Drafting Committee, and a new white paper for futures of participation in the Wikimedia movement. (continue reading)
Stakeholders coordination: launch of a helpdesk for Affiliates and volunteer communities working on content partnership. (continue reading)
Leadership development: updates on leadership projects by Wikimedia movement organizers in Brazil and Cape Verde. (continue reading)
Internal knowledge management: launch of a new portal for technical documentation and community resources. (continue reading)
Innovate in free knowledge: high-quality audiovisual resources for scientific experiments and a new toolkit to record oral transcripts. (continue reading)
Evaluate, iterate, and adapt: results from the Equity Landscape project pilot (continue reading)
Other news and updates: a new forum to discuss Movement Strategy implementation, upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election, a new podcast to discuss Movement Strategy, and change of personnel for the Foundation's Movement Strategy and Governance team. (continue reading)
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.
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)
The Affiliate voting process has concluded. Representatives from each Affiliate organization learned about the candidates by reading candidates’ statements, reviewing candidates’ answers to questions, and considering the candidates’ ratings provided by the Analysis Committee. The selected 2022 Board of Trustees candidates are:
You may see more information about the Results and Statistics of this Board election.
Please take a moment to appreciate the Affiliate Representatives and Analysis Committee members for taking part in this process and helping to grow the Board of Trustees in capacity and diversity. These hours of volunteer work connect us across understanding and perspective. Thank you for your participation.
Thank you to the community members who put themselves forward as candidates for the Board of Trustees. Considering joining the Board of Trustees is no small decision. The time and dedication candidates have shown to this point speaks to their commitment to this movement. Congratulations to those candidates who have been selected. A great amount of appreciation and gratitude for those candidates not selected. Please continue to share your leadership with Wikimedia.
Thank you to those who followed the Affiliate process for this Board election. You may review the results of the Affiliate selection process.
The next part of the Board election process is the community voting period.You may view the Board election timeline here. To prepare for the community voting period, there are several things community members can engage with in the following ways:
Read candidates’ statements and read the candidates’ answers to the questions posed by the Affiliate Representatives.
An Election Compass is a tool to help voters select the candidates that best align with their beliefs and views. The community members will propose statements for the candidates to answer using a Lickert scale (agree/neutral/disagree). The candidates’ answers to the statements will be loaded into the Election Compass tool. Voters will use the tool by entering in their answer to the statements (agree/disagree/neutral). The results will show the candidates that best align with the voter’s beliefs and views.
Here is the timeline for the Election Compass:
July 8 - 20: Volunteers propose statements for the Election Compass
July 21 - 22: Elections Committee reviews statements for clarity and removes off-topic statements
July 23 - August 1: Volunteers vote on the statements
August 2 - 4: Elections Committee selects the top 15 statements
August 5 - 12: candidates align themselves with the statements
August 15: The Election Compass opens for voters to use to help guide their voting decision
The Elections Committee will select the top 15 statements at the beginning of August
Best,
Movement Strategy and Governance
This message was sent on behalf of the Board Selection Task Force and the Elections Committee
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
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.
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. [253][254]
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. [255]
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!
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)
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
Poland report: The summary of GLAM editing contest and the end of residency at the National Museum in Cracow; Cooperation with Wawel Royal Castle; Hack(art)hon for Zachęta
Serbia report: Contemporary Art Edit-a-thon and Wikipedian in residence at the Historical Archive of Negotin
Sweden report: 100 000 Bildminnen; Uniforms, images from New Sweden, colonial officers, the map book of Fryderyk Getkant, and more!; Swedish general election 2022
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)
Hello. I'm writing on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team. In two weeks, we would like to make the Vector 2022 skin the default on this wiki.
We have been working on it for the past three years. So far, it has been the default on more than 30 wikis, including sister projects, all accounting for more than 1 billion pageviews per month. On average 87% of active logged-in users of those wikis use Vector 2022.
It would become the default for all logged-out users, and also all logged-in users who currently use Vector legacy. Logged-in users can at any time switch to any other skins. No changes are expected for users of these skins.
[Why is a change necessary] The current default skin meets the needs of the readers and editors as these were 13 years ago. Since then, new users have begun using Wikimedia projects. The old Vector doesn't meet their needs.
[Objective] The objective for the new skin is to make the interface more welcoming and comfortable for readers and useful for advanced users. It draws inspiration from previous requests, the Community Wishlist Surveys, and gadgets and scripts. The work helped our code follow the standards and improve all other skins. We reduced PHP code in Wikimedia deployed skins by 75%. The project has also focused on making it easier to support gadgets and use APIs.
[Changes and test results] The skin introduces a series of changes that improve readability and usability. The new skin does not remove any functionality currently available on the Vector skin.
The sticky header makes it easier to find tools that editors use often. It decreases scrolling to the top of the page by 16%.
The new table of contents makes it easier to navigate to different sections. Readers and editors jumped to different sections of the page 50% more than with the old table of contents. It also looks a bit different on talk pages.
The new search bar is easier to find and makes it easier to find the correct search result from the list. This increased the amount of searches started by 30% on the wikis we tested on.
The skin does not negatively affect pageviews, edit rates, or account creation. There is evidence of increases in pageviews and account creation across partner communities.
[Try it out] Try out the new skin by going to the appearance tab in your preferences and selecting Vector 2022 from the list of skins.
It's possible to configure and personalize our changes. We support volunteers who create new gadgets and user scripts. Check out our repository for a list of currently available customizations, or add your own.
If no large concerns are raised, we plan on deploying in the week of October 3, 2022. If your community would like to request more time to discuss the changes, hit the button and write to us. We can adjust the calendar.
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.
The fourth edition of the Coolest Tool Award welcomes your nominations! What is your favorite Wikimedia related software tool? Please submit your favorite tools by October 12, 2022! The awarded projects will be announced and showcased in a virtual ceremony in December.
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.
Australia report: Behind the scenes with Australia's Wiki Loves Earth 2022 winner
Austria report: A Börthday present for Wikidata - the DACH Culture Contest
Brazil report: Reopening of Museu Paulista and other news
France report: Meeting with Prime minister cultural adviser; Residence at the Brittany Museum
India report: Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949
Indonesia report: GLAM Socialization; Wikistories for GLAM Competition
Italy report: September month of results and planning
Netherlands report: Wiki Loves Monuments Suriname first edition: 554 photos
New Zealand report: New Zealand Thesis Project and Te Papa Forget-me-nots
Poland report: The results of GLAM editing contest; GLAM Coordinators Meeting
Serbia report: External projects, great results and high level of independence
Sweden report: Bookfair back on site; Cultural history in High Schools; More identifiers from National Historical Museums of Sweden on Wikidata; Swedish general election 2022
USA report: Advocacy and Invention; New Smithsonian WiR; Called to Create; DC Statehood and Home Rule; Annual meeting; Wikipedian in Residence Opportunity at the Pérez Art Museum Miami
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.
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):
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.
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
Poland report: Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 selection process in progress; GLAM online meeting on evaluation of ten editions Wiki Loves Monuments in Poland
Serbia report: GLAMorous October; Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade; CEE Meeting
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.
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)
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)
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.
This award is highlighting software tools that have been nominated by contributors to the Wikimedia projects. The ceremony will be a nice moment to show appreciation to our tool developers and maybe discover new tools!
New Zealand report: Integrating with the BHL, loading natural science specimens and data
Poland report: How Wiki helps to explore and enjoy art & culture; Wiki workshop for the National Museum in Krakow; GLAM online meeting on ideas for 2023; Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
Serbia report: Wikipedian in residence at Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and National Museum of Zrenjanin
Sweden report: Wikipedian in Residence at Musikverket; Women and architecture; Gymnasiearbete; New uploads from the Swedish National Archives; WLM winners; Images of Äpplet
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)
We are inviting you to share your ideas for technical improvements to our tools and platforms. Long experience in editing or technical skills is not required. If you have ever used our software and thought of an idea to improve it, this is the place to come share those ideas!
The dates for the phases of the Survey will be as follows:
Phase 1: Submit, discuss, and revise proposals – Monday, Jan 23, 2023 to Sunday, Feb 6, 2023
Phase 2: WMF/Community Tech reviews and organizes proposals – Monday, Jan 30, 2023 to Friday, Feb 10, 2023
Phase 3: Vote on proposals – Friday, Feb 10, 2023 to Friday, Feb 24, 2023
Phase 4: Results posted – Tuesday, Feb 28, 2023
If you want to start writing out your ideas ahead of the Survey, you can start thinking about your proposals and draft them in the CWS sandbox.
We are grateful to all who participated last year. See you in January 2023!
請協助翻譯成您使用的語言 We are really sorry for posting in English
Voting in the Wikimedia sound logo contest has started. From December 6 to 19, 2022, please play a part and help chose the sound that will identify Wikimedia content on audio devices. Learn more on Diff.
The sound logo team is grateful to everyone who participated in this global contest. We received 3,235 submissions from 2,094 participants in 135 countries. We are incredibly grateful to the team of volunteer screeners and the selection committee who, among others, helped bring us to where we are today. It is now up to Wikimedia to choose the Sound Of All Human Knowledge.
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)
You are humbly invited to organize the Feminism and Folklore 2023 writing competition from February 1, 2023, to March 31, 2023 on your local Wikipedia. This year, Feminism and Folklore will focus on feminism, women's issues, and gender-focused topics for the project, with a Wiki Loves Folklore gender gap focus and a folk culture theme on Wikipedia.
You can help Wikipedia's coverage of folklore from your area by writing or improving articles about things like folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, women and queer folklore figures, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales, and more. Users can help create new articles, expand or translate from a list of suggested articles.
Organisers are requested to work on the following action items to sign up their communities for the project:
Create a page for the contest on the local wiki.
Set up a fountain tool or dashboard.
Create the local list and mention the timeline and local and international prizes.
Request local admins for site notice.
Link the local page and the fountain/dashboard link on the meta project page.
This year we would be supporting the community's financial aid for Internet and childcare support. This would be provided for the local team including their jury and coordinator team. This support is opt-in and non mandatory. Kindly fill in this Google form and mark a mail to support@wikilovesfolklore.org with the subject line starting as [Stipend] Name or Username/Language. The last date to sign up for internet and childcare aid from our team is 20th of January 2023, We encourage the language coordinators to sign up their community on this link by the 25th of January 2023.
Learn more about the contest and prizes on our project page. Feel free to contact us on our meta talk page or by email us if you need any assistance.
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 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. [316]
You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page. [317]
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. [318]
Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages. [319]
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. [320]
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).
New Zealand report: The Great Macron War, Critter of the Week, and West Couast Wikisource
Nigeria report: WikiLovesLibraries Nigeria:An initiative beyond 1Lib1Ref for Librarians in Nigeria
Poland report: The first European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; New articles on the collection of Wawel Royal Castle; Results of Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
Portugal report: Wikibase in social sciences and Public Domain Day celebrations
Spain report: Wikidata Birthday and ongoing projects
Sweden report: Musikverket; Media literacy graphics; Reports for project and to project partners
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)
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)
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)
Apologies as this message is not in your native language, 請協助翻譯成您使用的語言.
The WMF Language team is pleased to let you know that we will like to enable the Section and Content translation tool in Gan Chinese Wikipedia. For this, our team will love you to read about the tool and test the new Section Translation tool so you can:
Give us your feedback
Ask us questions
Tell us how to improve it
Below is background information about the tools and how you can test the Section translation tool.
Background information
Content Translation has been a successful tool for editors to create content in their language. More than one million articles have been created across all languages since the tool was released in 2015. However, the tool is not out of beta in Gan Chinese Wikipedia, limiting the discoverability of the tool and its use and blocking the enablement of the Section translation in your Wikipedia
Section Translation extends the capabilities of Content Translation to support mobile devices. On mobile, the tool will:
Guide you to translate one section at a time in order to expand existing articles or create new ones
Make it easy to transfer knowledge across languages anytime from your mobile device
We plan to enable the tools on Gan Chinese Wikipedia in the coming week if there are no objections from your community. After it is enabled, we’ll monitor the content created with the tools and process all the feedback. In any case, feel free to raise any concerns or questions you may already have as a reply to this message or on the project talk page
Try the Section translation tool
Before the enablement, you can try the current implementation of the tool in our testing instance. Once it is enabled on Gan Chinese Wikipedia, you’ll have access to https://gan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslation with your mobile device. You can select an article to translate, and machine translation will be provided as a starting point for editors to improve.
Provide feedback
Please provide feedback about Section translation on the project talk page. We want to hear about your impressions on
The section translation tool
What do you think about our plans to enable it
Your ideas for improving the tool
Thanks and we look forward to your feedback and questions.
The Content translation tool can be discovered by users through several entry points. However, users not interested in translation can disable it from their preferences. Also, with the Section translation tool, you can start translating an article on your mobile device right when you notice it is missing in Gan Chinese. From a Wikipedia article in any language, switch languages and search for 贛語. If the article does not exist, an option to translate it will appear, as shown in the image below.
We know that these tools will help translators in your community to add content using any device with ease. Content created with the Content and Section Translation tool will be marked with the "contenttranslation" and “sectiontranslaiton” tag, respectively, for the community to review. We’ll monitor the content created, but we are interested in hearing about your experience using the tools and reviewing the content created with it.
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)
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)
Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like 
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
wikimedia.org. Please help us translate this message to your local language. MediaWiki message delivery（討論） 2021年1月28日 (禮拜四) 08:01 (UTC)
wikimedia.org.
）中的一个选项来一次编辑一整个页面。 [231]
Vector legacy (current default)
Vector 2022
Vector legacy (current default)
Vector 2022
